Sixty days after onboarding we send every new Diagnose user a short survey. Eight questions. No net promoter score. We ask what changed about their day what they still find frustrating and what they wish they had known before they started.
We have run this survey with 40 physicians across internal medicine cardiology and psychiatry. The answers surprised us in one consistent way. The thing physicians talked about most was not documentation. It was eye contact.
What physicians actually reported
Fourteen of the 40 physicians mentioned unprompted that they were making more eye contact with patients. Three mentioned that patients had commented on it directly. One psychiatrist said it changed the quality of her sessions in a way she had not anticipated — that the absence of a keyboard between her and the patient altered the nature of the conversation itself.
We did not design Diagnose to improve eye contact. We designed it to remove documentation burden. The eye contact is a consequence of attention that is no longer divided between the patient and the screen.
What physicians still find frustrating
The most common frustration at 60 days is the verbal narration habit for physical findings — the practice of briefly stating what you are observing during examination so Diagnose can capture it. Most physicians adapt within the first week but a small number find it disruptive to their examination flow.
We are working on this. It is the hardest part of the ambient documentation problem and we do not have a complete solution yet. We would rather say that clearly than imply the experience is frictionless when it is not entirely.
