How Scribe Actions Help The Heart Center for Women Save 20 Minutes Per Encounter

Caitlin Giesler, Owner and Physician of The Heart Center for Women, is dedicated to providing personalized cardiovascular care while ensuring that every patient’s health needs receive thoughtful attention. As a physician managing a wide range of cardiovascular concerns, Caitlin understands the importance of accurate documentation, timely follow-ups, and efficient clinical workflows that support long-term patient health.

At the core of her approach is the belief that technology should simplify administrative work while helping physicians stay focused on what matters most: their patients. That is why she uses SigmaMD’s Scribe Actions to streamline the tasks that follow each visit, from adding problems and ordering labs and imaging to creating follow-up reminders and managing referrals. By turning clinical documentation into actionable next steps, Scribe Actions helps reduce manual data entry and minimize the need to switch between different sections of the chart.

In this conversation, Caitlin shares how SigmaMD’s Scribe Actions save her at least 20 minutes per encounter, helping her complete post-visit tasks more efficiently and stay on top of important patient follow-ups. She also discusses how suggested actions can serve as valuable reminders, support cardiovascular care coordination, and simplify documentation for medication and procedure authorizations, allowing her to spend less time on administrative processes and more time delivering attentive, proactive care.

Saving Time After Every Patient Visit

For many physicians, completing a patient encounter involves much more than writing and signing a clinical note. After a visit, clinicians may still need to update problem lists, order laboratory tests and imaging, create follow-up tasks, and send referrals to other providers.

Before using Scribe Actions, Caitlin handled these processes manually. She would review her notes, navigate between different sections of the electronic medical record, search for the appropriate orders, and type out reminders and referral details.

Closing an encounter could take 20 to 30 minutes, and despite her efforts to complete everything after each appointment, the work sometimes carried over until the end of the day or even the following morning.

With Scribe Actions, much of that work has become more streamlined.

“Almost all of these processes are prompted by actions,” Caitlin explains. Instead of manually entering each item, she can select suggested actions to add problems to the chart, populate laboratory orders, and create follow-up tasks with relevant details already included.

The result is a more efficient process that reduces repetitive data entry and the need to navigate between multiple sections of the chart.

At Least 20 Minutes Saved Per Encounter

One of the most significant benefits Caitlin has experienced is the time saved after each visit.

By using Scribe Actions to help complete documentation and administrative tasks, she estimates that she saves at least 20 minutes per encounter.

Suggested tasks are particularly helpful because they can include ready-to-use reminders, such as calling a patient to review a blood pressure log or reminding them to schedule a follow-up appointment.

Rather than typing each reminder from scratch, Caitlin can review and select the appropriate action with a single click.

For a physician managing an entire practice independently, these time savings can make a meaningful difference. Less time spent completing repetitive administrative work means more time available for patient care and other responsibilities.

Turning Clinical Notes Into Actionable Next Steps

Scribe Actions helps bridge the gap between documenting a visit and completing the work that follows it.

During a typical encounter, Caitlin reports that the Actions tab may surface approximately 15 to 20 suggestions. She uses about half of them, depending on the patient's needs and what is already documented in the chart.

Some suggestions may duplicate existing problems or medications, while others identify useful next steps that might otherwise require additional manual work.

Caitlin reviews the suggested actions and selects those that are relevant to the encounter. She appreciates that the system can surface potential follow-up needs, even when she ultimately decides that a particular task is unnecessary.

This approach helps her organize post-visit responsibilities while maintaining control over what gets added to each patient's record.

Helping Ensure Important Patient Concerns Are Not Overlooked

Beyond saving time, Scribe Actions can help clinicians keep important patient concerns on their radar.

Caitlin recalls a recent encounter with a patient who had several cardiovascular risk factors and conditions, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and prediabetes. During the visit, they also discussed a family history of cardiac amyloidosis and the possibility of genetic screening.

With several immediate medical concerns to address, the genetic testing discussion was not initially at the forefront of Caitlin's mind.

However, when she reviewed the suggested action items, she was reminded to follow up with the patient about the potential screening.

Caitlin considered this an important reminder because of the possible implications for the patient's long-term cardiovascular health.

This experience illustrates how suggested actions can serve as an additional checkpoint after a visit, helping clinicians revisit important discussions and identify follow-up opportunities that deserve attention.

Supporting Continuity of Care Beyond the Appointment

As the sole physician managing her practice, Caitlin is responsible for following through on the tasks generated by patient encounters.

She uses reminders to help coordinate care beyond the clinic visit, including checking on blood pressure logs, following up on procedures performed by other providers, and contacting patients when needed.

Although many patients already have return appointments scheduled to review laboratory and imaging results, task reminders are useful for issues that require additional attention between visits.

For Caitlin, this is particularly relevant to cardiovascular care, where monitoring progress and coordinating with other providers can play an important role in managing patients' ongoing health needs.

By making follow-up tasks easier to create, Scribe Actions helps her keep track of responsibilities while supporting a more coordinated approach to care.

Simplifying Documentation for Authorizations

Accurate clinical documentation is especially important when requesting prior authorization for medications, imaging studies, and cardiovascular procedures.

Caitlin finds the ICD-10 and CPT coding suggestions displayed alongside relevant problems and procedures helpful when building patient problem lists and preparing supporting documentation.

As a cardiologist, she frequently works with testing and procedures such as stress tests, coronary angiography, and cardiac MRI. Timely authorization can be essential to ensuring patients can move forward with recommended care.

Although her practice does not bill insurance directly and she does not work with a dedicated biller, she reports that Scribe Actions has made it easier to document information needed for medication, imaging, and procedure authorizations.

Having relevant coding details available alongside suggested actions helps simplify documentation and reduces the effort involved in preparing information for these requests.

Maintaining Accuracy Through Physician Review

While automation helps streamline clinical workflows, physician oversight remains essential.

Caitlin reviews and confirms everything before adding it to a patient's chart. She finds that suggested problems, laboratory orders, imaging orders, family history entries, and tasks are generally accurate and often require little to no adjustment.

She also recognizes that some suggestions may be redundant, particularly when information has already been entered during a previous visit. In those cases, she simply skips the unnecessary items.

Medication suggestions, however, are not always as accurate, so she pays particular attention to reviewing those details.

This review process allows her to benefit from the efficiency of suggested actions while ensuring that the information added to the medical record is appropriate for each patient.

A More Efficient Way to Complete the Work After Each Visit

For Caitlin Giesler, Scribe Actions has changed how she approaches the administrative work that follows a patient encounter. Tasks that once required 20 to 30 minutes of manual entry and navigation can now be completed more efficiently with suggested actions and prepopulated information.

The time savings, combined with reminders for important patient concerns and easier documentation for prior authorizations, help her manage the demands of running a practice independently.

Her experience highlights the value of connecting clinical documentation with the next steps in care. By reducing repetitive work and helping clinicians identify relevant follow-up actions, SigmaMD’s Scribe Actions supports a more organized workflow and gives physicians more time to focus on their patients.