AI Scribe for Nurse Practitioners: How a Solo Practice Documents in Multiple Languages

The work of a medical provider doesn’t end when the patient leaves the exam room. Each visit must be carefully documented, a task that can add hours to any provider’s day. That task can become even more complex for practices that serve populations with significant numbers of non-English speakers.

Fortunately, today’s medical providers, including the nearly half a million nurse practitioners across the U.S., have advanced healthcare IT tools that can dramatically reduce the burdens of daily documentation. Sunoh.ai®, an AI-powered medical scribe with multilingual capabilities that integrates with the eClinicalWorks EHR, can help NPs spend less time on their computers and more time face-to-face with their patients.

An AI scribe for nurse practitioners can be particularly valuable for smaller practices, whose providers are usually trying to see six to 12 patients a day, complete documentation, and attend to dozens of other issues that arise in the course of their day.

Facing Realities of the 60-Hour Work Week

According to the AMA’s 2023 Organizational Biopsy survey, physicians reported working nearly 60 hours each week, with more than a third of their time spent on indirect patient care or administrative tasks.

Although the survey focused on physicians, the administrative burden it describes is familiar across clinical roles, including nurse practitioners who manage patient visits, care plans, documentation, follow-up, and daily practice operations.

For independent clinicians, what may start out as a few minutes to wrap up their notes following a visit can quickly expand to 20 minutes or more. With more patients that must be seen, providers must postpone completing their documentation, which then follows them on their lunch hour, between visits, and often long after they have gone home for the day.

Winning Back Time in Pueblo, Colorado

Excessive documentation time was exactly the challenge facing Jesusita Tafoya, a family nurse practitioner who runs her own practice. Seeing six to 12 patients a day sounds like a reasonable workload, but 15-20 minutes of post-visit documentation work meant Tafoya was spending hours each day on paperwork.

All that listening, assessment, decision making, care planning, coding support, and documentation is, of course, vital to what medical providers do. However, for a solo nurse practitioner, having to complete that work manually had a major impact on the pace of each day, the time available to spend with each patient, and Tafoya’s ability to keep her work confined to office hours.

With Sunoh.ai, Tafoya reduced documentation time to just three to five minutes per patient, allowing her to complete her documentation much more quickly. She estimates that she is saving at least two hours every day on clinical documentation, time that she is using to further enhance the high quality of care that her small practice is known for.

What Sunoh.ai Does During the Patient Visit

Sunoh.ai uses ambient listening technology to listen to patient-provider conversations and generates a structured draft note. Providers must, of course, carefully review such notes for accuracy and edit them as needed before making them part of the patient’s record.

The value of Sunoh, an AI scribe for nurse practitioners, physicians, or other providers, consists of generating a highly accurate initial draft as well as allowing providers to document visits in languages other than English.

In addition to English, Tafoya Family Practice sees many patients whose first language is Spanish or Mandarin. Without an AI scribe, notes from a visit that is conducted in one language need to be completed in English. Providers must either translate the patients’ words and their own thoughts into English during the visit or spend additional time completing documentation after the visit.

According to the Tafoya Family Practice customer success story, the tool manages “various dialects of Spanish and Mandarin.” The point is documentation, not interpretation. The clinical encounter still depends on the provider’s judgment, communication, and responsibility for the final note. But for a nurse practitioner documenting visits that occur in Spanish or Mandarin, an AI scribe can help create a draft that better reflects the language of the encounter.

How Sunoh.ai Functions Within eClinicalWorks

Sunoh works as an independent app or integrated with an EHR. For practices using the eClinicalWorks EHR, deep native integration means the draft note can pull directly into the Progress Note, without requiring the provider to copy and paste information from one system into another.

That matters in any practice, but it can matter even more in a solo practice. Larger organizations may have staff, processes, or workaround capacity to absorb an inefficient handoff. A solo clinician often does not. If documentation requires switching between tools, re-entering information, or moving text manually, the time saved during one part of the workflow can disappear somewhere else.

An EHR for solo practices needs to support the realities of a smaller operation. The provider is often the clinician, decision maker, documentation owner, and follow-up coordinator. A draft note that appears where the provider already works can help make the workflow feel more practical.

For eClinicalWorks users, the value is not simply that an AI scribe creates a draft. It is that the draft can fit into the clinical documentation process inside the EHR, where the provider can review it, make changes, and sign the final note. That connection helps reduce the friction between the patient conversation and the completed Progress Note.

For any practice — regardless of size, location, or how their patients communicate — Sunoh.ai is speaking the language of efficiency and success. Visit sunoh.ai to learn more.