Walk into almost any clinical consultation and you’ll notice a familiar setting: a clinician carefully balancing their attention between the patient in front of them and the screen beside them, capturing notes as the conversation unfolds.
This has become such a natural part of care that it’s rarely questioned. In speaking with many healthcare professionals through our own survey, many admitted to us that administrative tasks can take up around 40% of their working day.
And when the process feels difficult, the focus turns to helping clinicians adapt - typing more efficiently, using templates or finding better ways to multi-task...
A recent NHS study proves this challenge isn’t about clinician capability at all. When ambient and AI-assisted documentation tools were introduced, clinicians spent over 23% more time in direct patient interaction, while overall appointment length reduced by 8.2%. In A&E settings, this translated into a 13.5% increase in patients seen per shift.
Typing during consultations is a signal that the tools supporting care haven’t kept pace with how care is actually delivered.
In our article, we explore why typing during consultations is less about clinician performance and more about workflow design - and what it means to adopt technology that truly supports patient-centred care.
The impossible standard we’ve normalised
During every consultation, clinicians are expected to do something extraordinary: listen attentively to a patient’s story, ask the right questions at the right moment, observe tone, emotion and body language, formulate clinical reasoning in real time.
And simultaneously type structured, compliant documentation.
In almost any other profession, asking someone to be fully present in a human interaction while writing detailed notes at the same time would feel unreasonable. The problem isn’t that clinicians can’t multitask well enough, it’s that we’ve designed systems that assume they should.
Conversations are human, documentation is not
Patients don’t present their symptoms in neat bullet points. They pause, digress, backtrack and reveal important details when they feel heard.
Yet Electric Health Records (EHRs) are rigid. They prioritise structured fields and compliance checkboxes, meaning during consultations, clinicians are forced to translate live conversations into a bureaucratic format in real time.
But that comes at a cost.
Eye contact is lost, silences feel transactional rather than empathetic, and patients may share less when attention feels divided.
Designing for how care actually happens
Ambient speech technology offers a fundamentally different approach. Instead of forcing clinicians to capture information manually while speaking, these tools allow conversations to happen naturally, all while documentation is seamlessly created in the background.
It listens unobtrusively, understands clinical context, and produces structured notes without pulling clinicians away from the patient in front of them.
The goal isn’t to replace clinicians or automate care. It’s to remove frictions, so that clinicians can be fully present.
This is exactly the problem G2 Speech’s SpeechAmbient is designed to solve. SpeechAmbient enables clinicians to focus on patient conversation. It captures clinical dialogue and transforms it into accurate, structured documentation - removing the need for constant typing during consultations.
The result is more human consultation. Clinicians can maintain eye contact, patients feel heard, documentation happens without disrupting care, and notes are completed in real-time.
Rather than asking clinicians to work (even!) harder, SpeechAmbient works smarter by adapting to real clinical workflows instead of forcing new ones.
Request a demo with one of our experts and discover how SpeechAmbient can streamline documentation, improve consultation flow, and help your clinicians stay fully engaged with patients.