u/ArcadiaBunny

IM attending, 6 years out of residency. I went into medicine to take care of patients. I spend roughly half my day documenting that I took care of patients.

this isn't a new complaint but it's getting worse. the regulatory and billing requirements keep expanding. the click burden in Epic is absurd. I documented a straightforward follow-up visit today and the note took longer than the visit. a 15-minute patient encounter generated 20 minutes of documentation.

I know the reasons. billing compliance, malpractice protection, quality metrics, continuity of care, insurance requirements. I understand why it exists. I'm just saying the current implementation is broken. we're spending physician time on data entry work that should be handled differently.

a few things I've tried to reduce the pain:

dot phrases. I have about 30 of them for common scenarios. they help but they make notes look templated and sometimes I need to customize more than a dot phrase allows.

scribes. had one for 6 months when our practice could afford it. genuinely helpful. documenting during the encounter meant I could focus on the patient. we lost funding for the position though.

AI ambient listening (tried two different products). promising concept, not ready yet for my practice. the drafts needed too much correction and I was worried about accuracy for medically complex patients. I'll try again next year.

quick voice memos to myself between patients. this is the lowest-tech thing I do but it helps the most on busy days. between patients I'll spend 15 seconds saying the relevant details. "follow-up, Mr. Johnson, A1c came down from 8.2 to 7.1, staying on current metformin dose, discussed diet compliance, recheck in 3 months." I use Willow Voice for this, it's an AI voice dictation tool, and the transcription gives me something to reference when I get to the charting instead of trying to remember 12 patient encounters in sequence at the end of the day.

but none of this fixes the fundamental problem. we need structural reform in how documentation works in medicine, not better workarounds. every year the burden increases and every year we add another bandaid.

how are other physicians managing the documentation load? and is anyone seeing improvement from their institution or is it just getting worse everywhere?

Marketing manager at a 50-person tech company. I've tried probably 30 AI tools in the last year. most don't stick. here's where I landed.

daily use (actually open every day):

claude - my main AI tool. writing, analysis, brainstorming, strategy docs. replaced chatgpt as my default about 4 months ago. better at following complex instructions and the writing sounds less robotic. projects feature keeps context across sessions which is huge for ongoing work.

chatgpt - I still use it for two things: image generation (DALL-E) and data analysis (code interpreter). upload a CSV, ask questions, get charts. for those specific tasks it's better than claude. for everything else I've switched.

cursor - I build landing pages and simple internal tools. cursor makes me probably 3x faster. tab completions are scary good and composer can scaffold a whole page from a description.

willow voice - AI voice dictation tool. I dictate into whatever app is open. emails, slack, claude prompts, meeting notes, doc drafts. my daily word output probably tripled when I started using this because talking is just faster than typing. the thing that keeps me using it is that my slack messages come out sounding like slack and my emails come out sounding like emails without me thinking about it. $15/mo, no android app.

perplexity - research. when I need current information with sources. replaced most of my work google searches. pro search mode is worth the subscription.

tried and dropped:

jasper - AI writing tool. the output was always generic and needed so much editing it wasn't saving time. I can get better results from claude with a good prompt.

copy.ai - same problem as jasper. template-based AI writing just doesn't produce anything I'd actually publish.

otter.ai - meeting transcription. the transcripts were too noisy. a 30-minute meeting becomes 15 pages of text with half of it being filler. I'd rather spend 60 seconds recapping the meeting in my own words.

notion AI - built-in AI in notion. it's fine but I already have claude open and it's better at everything. didn't need another AI tool embedded in my notes app.

beautiful.ai - AI presentations. the templates are nice but the AI-generated content was always too generic. I make better decks by outlining in claude and building in google slides.

gamma - AI presentations. similar to beautiful.ai. fast for a rough draft but the output looks like every other AI deck. clients can tell.

lessons:

- the tools that stuck are the ones I use for everything, not specialized ones

- AI tools that produce generic output aren't worth paying for because you can get generic output from claude for free

- the bottleneck for AI quality is always input quality, not the tool

what AI tools made it into your daily rotation?

Been trying to figure out the "right" way to get clean web data into AI workflows without the whole thing being a maintenance nightmare.

talked to a bunch of people building similar stuff. answers ranged from "just use beautifulsoup" to "build your own playwright cluster" to "scraping is dead, use APIs only."

after trying most of these approaches myself here's my honest take:

Beautifulsoup is fine for dead simple static sites, breaks immediately on anything JS rendered

playwright/puppeteer DIY do works but you're now maintaining infrastructure, not building a product. proxy bans, memory leaks, captcha loops, it never ends

building on top of a web data API, honestly the one that's let me actually focus on the product. you pass a URL, get clean markdown or JSON back, someone else handles the rendering and bot protection

the DIY scraper era feels like it's over for most use cases unless you have very specific needs. curious if others have landed in the same place or if i'm missing something

I accidentally missed a number in the shipping address for my paypal card, so it never arrived. Is it absolutely necessary for me to cancel it and have a new one sent, or is there any way they can resend the same one?

I have already done this twice before due to some mishaps with the address, so I really dont want to have to cancel and order new again.