The average physician spends 36 minutes on electronic health record tasks for every patient they see, according to a study conducted by the American Medical Association. Multiply that by the average 20 patients a physician will see each day, and time spent on administrative work becomes not just tedious but detrimental to a physician’s ability to do their job.
Charting and documenting patient visits reduces the amount of time physicians can spend with patients and leads to higher levels of burnout, an all-too-common issue affecting physicians across the country.
Doximity’s new solution, Scribe, is intended to reduce the weight of this administrative burden. Powered by AI, the solution is designed to transcribe and summarize patient visits and integrate with physicians’ current workflows.
Engineering Director Keith Roehrenbeck, who has played a key role throughout Scribe’s development, shared that the new solution aligns with the company’s mission to improve physicians’ lives, a worthy cause that teammates can rally around.
“That shared sense of purpose keeps the team energized and deeply committed to the work,” he said.
Roehrenbeck believes that there are several things that set Doximity apart in the industry, including its commitment to putting physicians first. By actively partnering with physicians at every stage of the product lifecycle when building solutions like Scribe, the company ensures that its teams are solving real problems with impactful solutions.
“Their feedback shapes our priorities, our design choices and even how we measure success,” Roehrenbeck said.
Leaning on the latest technologies and cross-functional collaboration, he and his peers crafted a clinically informed, HIPAA-compliant product with the potential to redefine physicians’ lives. Below, Roehrenbeck describes the work that went into developing Scribe, the impact it has on physicians and how it reflects Doximity’s dominance in the industry.
About Doximity
Doximity’s digital platform enables physicians to collaborate with colleagues, stay up to date with the latest medical news and research, manage their careers and on-call schedules, streamline documentation and administrative paperwork, and conduct virtual patient visits.
Why did Doximity need to build this product? What gave rise to it, and what impact will this product launch have on the business or its customers?
We built Scribe to address the considerable time and effort physicians spend charting and documenting patient visits. This administrative burden diminishes the time available for direct patient care and the quality of that care. Leveraging advancements in AI, we created Scribe as a HIPAA-compliant workflow solution to directly mitigate this issue. By transcribing and summarizing patient visits, Scribe can help significantly decrease the administrative burden on physicians, enabling a greater focus on patient care. Our physician users tell us this boost in efficiency helps increase job satisfaction and can even improve the quality of patient visits. Furthermore, Scribe is designed to integrate seamlessly with physicians’ current workflows, including those utilizing Doximity’s Dialer telehealth products.
“Our physician users tell us this boost in efficiency helps increase job satisfaction and can even improve the quality of patient visits.”
What role did you play in developing and launching the product? What tools or technologies did your team use to build the product and why?
I’ve managed the engineering team and supported the product team since the initial planning and implementation of Scribe. I’m hands-on with technical strategy, sprint planning and code review. Additionally, I work with our platform teams, legal and vendors to ensure Scribe remains reliable, performant and compliant. I’ve also been fortunate to speak with physicians firsthand to understand their needs and how Scribe has already helped them. To build Scribe, we used several advanced tools and technologies. Like other products at Doximity, Scribe is built on Ruby on Rails. We leverage medically-informed large language models and speech-to-text models to achieve high-quality transcription and summarization.
What obstacles did you encounter — and overcome — along the way? How did you keep team members motivated and aligned throughout the product development process?
AI tech like LLMs are non-deterministic, so traditional QA and continuous integration aren’t enough to ensure quality. To overcome this, we developed tooling and processes to evaluate model performance and quality. We also needed to develop a novel approach to transcription in order to prevent loss of medically-relevant terms and context, all within the constraints of HIPAA compliance, at near real-time speed. Scribe leverages new AI technologies and has an immediate impact on our core value of improving the lives of physicians. That shared sense of purpose keeps the team energized and deeply committed to the work.
What teams did you collaborate with in order to get this across the finish line? What strategies did you employ to ensure that cross-functional collaboration went smoothly?
We collaborated with several teams, including product engineering, platform and infrastructure, legal, finance, and our vendors. We employ weekly iteration planning, scrum and estimation to keep the team aligned across functions. We keep changes small and frequent, so as we learn and shift direction, the team is able to stay in sync.
“We keep changes small and frequent, so as we learn and shift direction, the team is able to stay in sync.”
When you think of other companies in your industry, how does Doximity compare when it comes to how you build and launch new products? What’s different about your workplace?
Doximity stands out in the industry for our structured and strategic approach to building and launching products. Guided by our clear mission to help doctors to be more productive, we are excellent at defining near- and long-term goals and executing them. More than anything though, our advantage is in our culture, which truly reflects our core values like Get Stuff Done and Straight Talk, where honest, direct and transparent communication drives collaboration.
Most importantly, we are physicians first. We actively partner with doctors at every stage of the product lifecycle — from concept to launch — to ensure we’re solving real problems that matter to them. Their feedback shapes our priorities, our design choices and even how we measure success. This deep partnership and unwavering advocacy for physicians is the biggest factor that differentiates us, ensuring our products don’t just work — they make a meaningful impact on the daily lives of those who use them.
