When you’re in Amarillo, Texas, you’re in the heart of the Texas Panhandle, a region noted for beautiful sunsets, open skies, and friendly people who can rely upon their neighbors. It could hardly be otherwise, because Amarillo is 125 miles north of Lubbock and hundreds of miles from Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, or Dallas.
So major medical providers here — such as Amarillo Medical Specialists — naturally play an important role in promoting good health for residents throughout the area.
Amarillo Medical Specialists offers the latest selection of primary care doctors in their area, as well as kidney and diabetes/endocrinology experts. Owned and managed by physicians, the independent practice puts its patients first, ahead of the priorities of large hospitals, government agencies, or insurers.
The Documentation Dilemma for Today’s Physicians
Amarillo’s leadership mindset includes full use of the latest healthcare IT technologies, including AI-powered medical scribes. After all, in today’s highly connected world, living in a beautiful, rural region far from major metropolitan areas doesn’t have to mean settling for less than the best medical care.
Like thousands of practices nationwide, Amarillo was struggling with time-consuming methods of documenting encounters. A century ago, in much simpler times, doctors served far fewer patients, knew each of them well, and had plenty of time to make notes and build clear and complete patient records by hand.
Today’s fast-paced world, with far more patients and far greater regulatory requirements, makes typing notes during a patient encounter a real challenge for providers.
Paying close attention to clinical details may produce a great Progress Note but takes time and may come at the expense of capturing some subtlety that could be critical in developing an effective treatment.
Focusing entirely on the patient can mean building stronger trusts, but that trust might be undermined if the resulting Progress Note is missing critical details that result in less than optimal care.
Adopting the Latest AI Technology
One solution to that dilemma for today’s physicians is using an AI medical scribe to capture clinical details while leaving the doctor free to focus more attention on the patient throughout the encounter.
“More than 90% of the patients that I see in a day are returning patients,” said Dr. William C. Biggs, an endocrinology at Amarillo Medical Associates, who has enthusiastically adopted Sunoh.ai medical scribe for daily documentation. “They really like the fact that I’m not typing things into the screen anymore. But what’s interesting in my own mind is when I’m reading the Notes — and this is just from a few hours earlier — there might have been something, you know, that the patient mentioned that perhaps I didn’t pick up on so much previously.”
Dr. Biggs is hardly alone in his use of AI scribe technology, but such tools have still not won acceptance among a majority of doctors.
A report in the April 2025 American Family Physician notes that a majority of physicians are interested in adopting AI solutions, but only 38% have done so. Yet the report makes clear the positive impact of such technology: “Initial results from AI integrated organizations show that AI scribe programs significantly decrease electronic health record workload.”
What’s behind the reluctance to embrace AI ambient listening? According to AFP, physicians cite technological constraints and ethical concerns. The report adds that critiques “underestimate the dynamic nature of technologic evolution and health care’s capacity to refine these tools, ensuring they are tailored to meet the evolving needs of clinicians.”
AI Today: Mounting Evidence of Success
For Dr. Biggs and thousands of other physicians, the advantages of AI scribes are clear.
“The Notes have actually gotten to the point where in some ways they are better than what I was originally doing,” Dr. Biggs said. “We’re on the cusp of this actually doing a little bit better than the human operator.”
Many others agree. A March 2024 report by the American Medical Association found widespread adoption of ambient AI scribes at The Permanente Medical Group throughout Northern California.
Of the approximately 10,000 physicians who were offered use of an AI scribe, more than 3,400 used it for more 303,000 patient encounters — and saved on average an hour per doctor per day. Adoption grew steadily over a 10-week study period, with nearly 1,000 doctors using the tool more than 100 times.
Giving It a Try and Overcoming Imperfections
The AMA report noted the ambient scribe in use did occasionally produce hallucinations, a term for AI results that appear plausible but are in fact false, misleading, or fabricated by the software.
Developers of AI systems are aware of such limitations and continue to refine products to improve their accuracy and overall performance.
In the healthcare field, physicians who employ AI systems of any kind — and particularly those who do so for clinical documentation — are guided by the principle that they must review draft documentation before it is made a permanent part of a patient’s record.
Given AI technology’s ongoing improvements — and the many safeguards in place — Dr. Biggs believes doctors should adopt such tools.
“Well, I would just encourage them to try it,” he said, “because I think you’ll be impressed once you see the results. I’m using Sunoh for essentially all my established patients, so, returning patients. Basically, it’s much faster, because I’m reviewing the Note rather than composing it and editing it. In the past, I would have completed my Note immediately after seeing the patient. That slowed me down. I couldn’t see so many patients.”
And Sunoh’s multilingual capacities — it can be used for encounters conducted in Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Hindi, and a dozen other major languages, mean that it is helping extend access to care to patients throughout an increasingly diverse U.S.
“I have enjoyed the AI visit summary, translating that from English to Spanish,” Dr. Biggs said. “That has been great. For me to be able to print that out in Spanish instantly — the patients have been very impressed with that.”
To learn more and book a no-commitment demo, visit sunoh.ai today.