| Talk your letters and admin notes into text, drop in your normal exam and patient instructions with a shortcut, and catch typos in every Windows program. | | You know the drill. Clinic ran 40 minutes behind, the last patient left at 5:30, and now it’s time for the part nobody put in the job description: the charting. Open encounters. The same normal exam you’ve typed a thousand times. The same “your results are within normal limits” portal reply. An in-basket full of refills and prior auth paperwork. And after all that, a recommendation letter you promised a former resident two weeks ago. Most of pajama time isn’t thinking. It’s typing. Sound familiar? ❓ Here’s the thing: I can’t make your EMR faster. Nobody outside the vendor can. But I can help you type less, talk more, and catch the typos before anybody else does. So below are the tools I’d hand any physician, NP, PA, nurse, scribe or practice manager, most helpful first. Some run on your Windows PC, some run right in your browser. Two quick heads-ups before we start: 1. None of these connect to your EMR. They work on the Windows PC around it. (If hospital IT has your workstation locked down, your home PC is the easy place to start.) 2. A few of them use online AI services (OpenAI, AssemblyAI, Claude). I’ve flagged every one. Those are for your non-PHI work unless your organization has approved that service for patient information. That’s your compliance officer’s call, not mine. Click Learn more on any one for the full rundown. Now on with the show… 😃 | | Your Notes: Type It Once, Reuse It Every Day ⌨️ | Your EMR’s dot phrases only work inside the EMR. These work across your whole Windows PC: Outlook, Word, Teams, the payer portal, the prior auth web form. And they run on your own PC, no online AI service involved. | | Tool | What it does for you | Prompt Assistant
Learn more → | Your normal exam. Your ROS with the pertinent negatives. The patient instructions you give ten times a day. The “labs look good, see you in 6 months” portal reply. The prior auth justification boilerplate. Type each one once, file it in folders, then drop it in with a hotkey, a short abbreviation or a right-click menu. A search box finds the right one whether you have 10 snippets or 1,000. Your snippets are stored on your own PC. | AutoSuggester
Learn more → | Type the first few letters and it pops up suggestions for the words you type often, like autocomplete on your phone but on your PC. It uses fuzzy matching, so a sloppy start still finds the word. Handy for the long drug names, diagnoses and specialist names that show up in your letters and messages every week. You set how many letters trigger it and how many suggestions show. (It watches your keystrokes to do its job, so on a work machine, clear it with IT first.) | Clipboard History
Learn more → | Keeps a history of everything you copy, stamped with the time and the program it came from, and suggests entries from that history as you type. Copy the pharmacy fax number, the referring provider’s NPI or the policy link once, and it’s there the next time you need it. (Heads-up: it remembers what you copy, and that includes anything with patient info in it. Treat that PC accordingly, and check with IT before running it on a work machine.) |
| | Tip: Start with the five things you type most: your normal exam, your ROS, and your three most common patient instructions. Test them in your own EMR window first, especially if you chart over Citrix or a remote connection, since some setups handle typed and pasted text differently. And the usual rule applies: whatever you drop in, you still own the note. Read it before you sign it. 😊 |
| | Dictate the Non-PHI Stuff Instead of Typing It 🎙️ | You already dictate into the chart with Dragon or your AI scribe. These two are for everything else you’d rather talk than type: letters, staff emails, committee memos, notes-to-self, CE and grand rounds recordings, admin. Be clear on this one: both send your audio to an online AI service. No patient encounters, no PHI, unless your organization has approved that specific service for patient information. | | Tool | What it does for you | Voice to Text
Learn more → | Pick your microphone, pick a hotkey, then hold the hotkey and talk. Let go, and your words are on the clipboard, ready to paste anywhere. It uses OpenAI’s Whisper, which we’ve found to be a lot more accurate than the voice typing built into Windows. Perfect for the recommendation letter, the email to the front desk, the memo for the quality committee or the thought you want to capture before you forget it. (Your audio goes to OpenAI, an online service. Non-PHI work only unless your organization has approved it. It’s not a replacement for Dragon inside the chart.) | Transcriber
Learn more → | Turn audio and video files (MP3, WAV, MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI) into text, plus a summary of the key points. The grand rounds you recorded, a CME webinar, the monthly staff meeting, a long voice memo from the drive home. You pick the AI engine: OpenAI, AssemblyAI or Claude. (These are online AI services, so keep patient encounters and anything with PHI out of it unless your compliance officer has approved that service.) |
| | Tip: Rule of thumb: treat anything going to an online AI service the way you’d treat sending it to an outside vendor. If you wouldn’t send it to a vendor without a BAA, don’t dictate it into these. Everything else? Talk away. |
| | Catch the Typos Before Anybody Else Does ✅ | Word and Outlook check your spelling. The portal message, the Teams chat to the charge nurse and the payer’s web form usually don’t. Both of these run on your PC. | | Tool | What it does for you | AutoCorrect
Learn more → | Fixes over 4,000 common English misspellings as you type, in pretty much every Windows program. “Teh” becomes “the,” “recieve” becomes “receive,” and you never think about it. You can add your own, so the words YOU always fat-finger at the end of a long clinic day get fixed too. | Spell Check Everywhere
Learn more → | Spell check that runs across every Windows program you use, not just the ones that came with one. Catch the typo in the portal message, the in-basket note to your MA or the prior auth form before you hit send. (Give it a spin on your own vocabulary first; medical terms may get flagged.) |
| | At the Workstation: Easier on Your Eyes, Ears and Hands 👀 | Hours of squinting, clicking and reading add up. These take some of the strain off. | | Tool | What it does for you | MagGlass
Learn more → | Hold Win+Z (or any hotkey you pick) and a 3x magnifier appears right next to your cursor. Let go and it’s gone. Perfect for a lab value in a crowded flowsheet, the fine print on a med list, or a scanned fax that came in crooked. No wrestling with the built-in Windows Magnifier. | Text to Speech
Learn more → | Select text, press F1, and hear it read back in a natural-sounding AI voice. Press F2 to save it as an MP3. Hearing your own letter or patient handout read aloud is a great way to catch the sentence that doesn’t make sense. Or save that CE article as an MP3 and listen on the drive in. (It uses OpenAI’s text-to-speech, an online service, so nothing with PHI.) | Voice Access Shortcuts
Learn more → | Windows 11 has voice control built in. This tool lets you create, edit and remove your own custom voice shortcuts for the actions you say over and over, so more of the PC runs hands-free. (Needs Windows 11 build 22621 or newer. It’s a work in progress, and it’s for controlling Windows, not a replacement for your dictation software.) |
| | Tip: Set MagGlass to a hotkey you can hit with one hand while the other stays on the mouse. After a day or two you’ll reach for it without thinking, and you’ll stop leaning into the monitor. |
| | Find the Protocol, Scrub Before You Paste 🔍 | “Where does it say that?” is a question you hear every shift. And before any text leaves your screen, it’s worth a second look. | | Tool | What it does for you | SearchOnConcept
Learn more → | Ask your policy and procedure manual, your protocols, your CME PDFs and recorded lectures a plain-English question, like “when do we escalate a sepsis alert?” It finds the passage even when the document words it differently, and jumps you to the exact page or timestamp. It indexes files on your own machine. (Keep patient records out of it unless your compliance officer signs off.) | Personal Info Scrubber
Try it → | Want an AI chatbot to help tidy the wording of a patient education handout or a staff email? Strip names, card numbers and email addresses out first, right in your browser. It is NOT a HIPAA de-identification tool: dates, MRNs, addresses and other identifiers still need your eyes, and PHI stays out of public AI tools. Period. |
| | Tip: Start SearchOnConcept with the documents you search most: the policy manual and the protocols binder. Once they’re indexed, the new nurse’s question gets answered at the workstation instead of with a hunt through the binder. |
| One thing I’ve learned: you don’t need to fix your whole workday this week. Pick ONE thing on this list that bugs you every single clinic day. For most folks, that’s typing the same text over and over. Fix that. Then pick the next one. Fifteen minutes back at the end of the day is fifteen minutes less pajama time. That’s time for your family, your sleep and your sanity. That’s the real FREEDOM. How about you? What’s the one thing you type in every single note that you’d love to never type again? Drop me a note and tell me. I read every one. | | See All Our Tools | | the-Automator.com • Windows automation tools that give you your time back |
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