The Life Beyond Documentation: How Dr. Davis Got Her Evenings Back

For 15 years, Dr. Michelle Davis came home to the same dark cloud: unfinished documentation. Now, with Note Assist handling the cognitive burden of charting, she's reclaimed her time, her health, and her life.

Every evening for 15 years, Dr. Michelle Davis came home to the same dark cloud: unfinished documentation.

As a solo family physician in Metairie, Louisiana, Dr. Davis refused to let her laptop dominate patient visits. She wouldn't stare at her screen while patients talked. But she paid the price in what physicians call "pajama time" — lunch hours consumed by charting, then one to two hours at home each night, hunt-and-peck typing while trying to remember what each patient had discussed hours earlier.

Small elements of their stories were inevitably lost. And the cognitive burden of trying not to forget orders during visits, then reconstructing conversations from memory, created a relentless low-level stress that followed her everywhere.

"I can't type," Dr. Davis admits. "It was an absolute time drain for me."

But the alternative — staring at her laptop while patients talked — felt even worse. So she chose connection during visits and exhaustion afterward, resigned to the reality that meaningful patient care meant sacrificing her evenings. During appointments, she'd steal moments to type shorthand — mmg, alb, vit d — hoping the fragments would be enough to reconstruct the visit later. They rarely were.

What Changed

Dr. Davis was initially skeptical. She'd heard about a colleague using Google Glass that required strangers overseas listening in on exam rooms. She'd heard stories of dictation services that couldn't understand accents. When Note Assist came up, her expectations were low.

"With AI documentation I had concerns about privacy," she explains. "But Note Assist is part of Elation." Even so, she doubted it could keep up — with her, with her patients, with the fluid reality of a family medicine visit. "I had low expectations that it could understand what was being said in the visit — by me and by the patient and their family — and even less that it could adequately summarize a visit."

It did more than that.

"Once I started using it, it was clear that it was catching it all," she says. "Not just dictating the conversation but separating topics and succinctly wording them and the associated plans."

Ninety minutes of nightly charting became fifteen minutes at lunch and fifteen before leaving the office — both done at work, neither bleeding into her life at home. And for the first time in her career, nothing slipped through.

"The scribe catches it all. I do not need to rely upon my memory of an event hours earlier anymore."

The Human Impact

But the real transformation happened after she closed her office door.

Without the dark cloud of unfinished work following her home, Dr. Davis started exercising. She cooked healthy meals. She sat down with her family for dinner. She hit a goal weight she'd set for a family wedding in May — and exceeded it.

"These lifestyle changes have improved my mood and sense of well-being — and helped me get healthier and lose weight."

Her kids are grown now, her youngest 16. But she thinks about what this would have meant a decade ago, when the evenings she lost to her laptop were evenings she couldn't get back.

"I can only imagine how lovely it would have been to have that time with them without the dark cloud of 'I have work left to do' hanging over my head. That was my reality for the past 15 years since adopting electronic medical records."

It doesn't have to be anyone else's.

For physicians still losing their evenings the way she lost hers, Dr. Davis is direct: "This will set you free. And you can trust it. You will be astounded by how well it listens and then writes your note — maybe better than you ever wrote it."

Ready to reclaim your evenings? Let us show you what Elation can do.