Hey there,

Somewhere in Ontario there's a family physician who spent twenty years finishing her notes after dinner. In 2024, a provincial pilot handed her an AI scribe — software that listens to the visit, with the patient's consent, and drafts the note while she talks to the actual human in front of her. She told the evaluators she now plans to keep practising a decade past sixty-five.

The pilot put numbers behind the story. OntarioMD gave 152 family doctors and nurse practitioners scribes for a spring — 17,415 real patient visits — and Women's College Hospital measured what happened. After-hours documentation, the infamous "pajama time," fell from 9.4 hours a week to 6.4. Three-quarters of clinicians reported less cognitive load during visits. And when the pilot ended, 82% asked to keep the scribe.

So Canada scaled it. Canada Health Infoway launched a national AI scribe program in June 2025, with fully funded licences through privacy-vetted vendors. Eight months in, 12,019 primary-care clinicians had enrolled, and scribes were drafting notes for 1.2 million patient visits a month. Same-day chart completion rose from 56% to nearly 75% — the note is finished when the day is.

The honest print: at national scale the measured savings are more modest than the pilot's — about an hour a week during work hours and nearly another after hours, growing the longer clinicians use the tool. The drafts still need a clinician's read before signing. And cost is the cliff: licences run $135–$400 a month, and almost nobody will pay that out of pocket — which is exactly why the public funding matters, and why it needs to continue.

That's the unfinished part. The scribe covers the conversation — but the requisition that follows it, the claim that pays for it, and the forms that orbit it are still typed and retyped by hand, by physicians and the admin team beside them. The same kind of technology that fixed the note can fix those too. That's the corner we work.

For now, though: thousands of Canadian clinicians ended last week with their charts done and their evenings free. Three years ago, that sentence would have read as fiction.

SapienSecure