Somewhere between the end of a procedure and the start of the billing process, operative notes often get lost in transit. The physician dictates, the recording goes back to their office, and your ASC’s billing team waits. Sometimes I’ll pull up a case from a week or two ago during a client site visit and the op note still isn’t there — and at that point, everything downstream is on hold.
Part of that is just physician behavior, and it’s not a criticism. The moment a surgeon finishes a case, they’re on to the next one. Before the patient is even fully out of the room, they’re heading to the next case, heading to their car, heading somewhere that isn’t your ASC. The traditional dictation workflow — calling into a service, waiting for the recording to route back through the physician’s office — works for some centers, but it wasn’t designed for the physicians who need to move faster or the ASCs that need notes completed immediately.
AI-powered transcription changes that dynamic, and for ASCs that haven’t yet started incorporating artificial intelligence into their operations, this is one of the better places to begin. The problem is well-defined, the workflow is specific, and the return is measurable. You’re not undertaking a major implementation or asking your staff to rethink how they work. You’re giving physicians a tool they can use from their phone — between cases, walking to their car — that produces a better op note faster and more accurately than what they’re doing today. And because there’s no speech coaching or voice training required, adoption tends to happen quickly. Physicians pick it up and move on.
Part of what makes traditional dictation solutions unreliable is how they actually work. Most are built on a single transcription model that does acoustic matching. This means the technology is measuring the pitch and frequency of sounds and mapping them to syllables. Even solutions trained on medical vocabulary are working without context, so when two words sound alike, the system frequently picks the wrong one. The problem is compounded by the reality that transcriptions need to be right the first time. When a physician is moving at that pace, there’s no practical opportunity to review and correct. With these systems, that’s a real risk.
A more sophisticated approach layers a second AI model on top of the initial transcription, one that understands context. It knows who the physician is, what procedure was performed, who the patient is. As the transcript is generated, that second model reviews it in real time, catching errors that acoustic matching alone would likely miss. The result is a note that’s cleaner, more complete, and genuinely reflective of what happened in that OR.
That accuracy matters for every case, but the financial stakes become clearer when you look at more complex procedures. For cases involving hardware, implants, or devices, every billable component needs to be documented. A note dictated days after the fact — or worse, never finalized — delays billing while creating real risk of undercoding or missed charges. For those procedures, getting the dictation done immediately, while the case is fresh, means fewer errors, faster days to bill, and confidence that nothing got left on the table. Any ASC tired of chasing down op notes will feel the difference, but centers doing higher-acuity work have even more to gain.
That’s what we at Surgical Information Systems have set out to address with SIS Scribe, a platform-agnostic dictation solution built specifically for ASCs that integrates with your existing practice management system — whether you’re on a SIS solution or not. On the data privacy side, a concern we hear often when AI comes up, SIS Scribe is fully HIPAA-compliant and recordings are never used to train AI models. If you would like to learn more about SIS Scribe and see it in action, I’d encourage you to visit sisfirst.com/sis-scribe.
Michael Scheidegger is a product manager for Surgical Information Systems, where he has led the development of several ASC-focused solutions including SIS Charts Physician Mobile, SIS Exchange, and the new SIS Scribe AI-powered transcription solution.
At the Becker’s 32nd Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs, taking place October 29-31 in Chicago, ASC leaders, surgeons and healthcare executives will explore strategies to drive growth, enhance operational performance, navigate reimbursement challenges and prepare for the future of ambulatory surgery. Apply for complimentary registration now.
