It is rarely one big task that slows down a clinic day. It is the small things. Opening another window. Searching for the right template. Re-entering something you already documented. Looking up a billing code. Copying a note from one application into another. Going back into yesterday’s charts because a few encounters were never completely finished.
Each action might take only a minute or two. But family medicine is repetitive by nature. When the same unnecessary step happens 15, 20, or 30 times a day, those minutes begin to matter.
For family physicians using Med Access, improving efficiency does not necessarily require changing how you practice medicine. Sometimes, it simply means reducing the number of steps between seeing the patient and completing the encounter.
Here are five Med Access shortcuts and workflow changes worth considering.
1. Build Med Access Templates Around the Visits You Actually See
Templates can be one of the most useful shortcuts in Med Access. They can also become another source of friction. A template works best when it reflects the way you actually conduct an encounter. If you constantly delete irrelevant sections, move information between fields, or rewrite most of the template; it is probably not saving as much time as you think.
Start with the visits you perform repeatedly.
Think about your typical:
- diabetes follow-up
- hypertension review
- medication review
- mental health follow-up
- annual or preventive care visit
- chronic disease follow-up
Instead of starting from scratch each time, create or refine templates around those recurring clinical patterns. The important part is not simply having more templates. It is having fewer, better templates that match your actual workflow.
For example, if you routinely document an encounter using Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan, your template should make that structure easy to complete without unnecessary navigation.
There is another advantage. Structured templates become particularly valuable when you use an AI scribe that understands where information belongs.
Rather than receiving a large, generated note and manually distributing it across Med Access fields, the documentation can be organized according to the structure you already use.
Medulla, for example, works alongside the Med Access encounter and can fill the relevant encounter template fields, reducing the need to reorganize generated documentation afterward. That turns your template from a documentation framework into a genuine workflow shortcut.
The principle: Do not build your clinic around your templates. Build your templates around your clinic.
2. Stop Moving Clinical Notes Between Browser Tabs
This may be one of the biggest opportunities for physicians already using an AI scribe. The scribe saves time generating the note. But what happens next?
In many workflows, it looks something like this:
Open Med Access → open AI scribe → conduct visit → generate note → review note → copy note → return to Med Access → find correct field → paste note → make corrections → sign encounter.
The AI helped with documentation. But it also introduced a second workflow.
The problem becomes more noticeable across a full clinic day. Suppose switching, reviewing, copying, pasting and reorganizing takes just 90 seconds per encounter. Across 20 patients, that is another 30 minutes.
The more useful shortcut is therefore not to: generate notes faster. It is the removal of the transfer step.
This is the distinction between an AI tool that sits beside your EMR and one that works within the encounter.
With Medulla, the AI opens alongside the Med Access patient encounter. Once the clinical note is ready, Fill Encounter Fields can transfer the relevant information into the appropriate fields in the selected Med Access template.
That means less copying and pasting. Less switching of tabs. And fewer opportunities to put information in the wrong place.
When evaluating any AI scribe for Med Access, this is an important question to ask: After the AI generates my note, how much work is still left for me?
That tells you much more about potential time savings than transcription speed alone.
3. Complete Billing While the Encounter Is Still Fresh
Billing often becomes inefficient because of when it happens. You see the patient. You complete the clinical work. You move on.
Billing becomes something you will “come back to.” Then the end of the day arrives. Now you are reopening encounters and trying to reconstruct visits that happened hours earlier. This creates two problems.
First, it takes longer because the encounter is no longer fresh in your mind. Second, legitimate billing opportunities may be easier to overlook when you are moving quickly through a backlog of unfinished charts.
A better shortcut is to make billing part of encounter sign-off:
Patient seen → note completed → billing reviewed → encounter signed → next patient.
In other words:
Bill as you sign off, not at the end of the day.
For simple, familiar visits, you may already know the appropriate billing information immediately.
For more complex encounters, however, finding the relevant diagnostic or service code can require another search. This is where encounter-aware AI can reduce another small administrative step.
Medulla’s AI Billing Assistant, for example, can surface relevant diagnostic and service-code suggestions based on the encounter and applicable provincial billing context.
The physician remains responsible for reviewing the suggestions and deciding what applies. The objective is not automated billing without oversight. It is reducing the need to remember, search and reconstruct the encounter later.
That distinction matters. A good billing shortcut should help you bill more accurately with less administrative effort, not encourage unnecessary billing.
4. Use the Patient Chart as Context Instead of Reconstructing It Yourself
Before some appointments, there is a familiar routine. Open the chart. Look through previous encounters. Check medications. Look for recent laboratory results. Review the problem list.
Try to remember what happened at the previous visit. Then start today’s encounter. For a patient you know well, this can be quick. For someone with multiple chronic conditions and a long chart, it may not be.
The opportunity here is not necessarily a traditional keyboard shortcut. It is a context shortcut. Instead of manually reconstructing the patient’s story every time, use tools that can help surface the relevant information already sitting in the chart.
This is increasingly important as clinical AI becomes more integrated with EMRs.A basic AI scribe knows what is said after you press record. A more context-aware clinical assistant can also use relevant information already available in the patient’s record to support the encounter.
That difference becomes particularly useful for questions such as:
What was the patient’s previous A1C?
What medications are they currently taking?
What was the plan from their last visit?
Has this issue been documented previously?
Are there relevant results I should review?
Medulla’s clinical AI capabilities are designed around this encounter-level context. Instead of requiring the physician to repeatedly feed information into a separate AI application, the patient chart can provide relevant context while the physician remains inside the Med Access workflow.
The physician still interprets the information and makes the clinical decision.
The shortcut is removing some of the searching required to get there.
5. Finish the Entire Encounter Before Opening the Next One
This may be the most valuable Med Access shortcut of all. And technically, it is not a shortcut. It is a workflow rule.
Finish the encounter before you move on.
Family physicians often work with a mental queue of unfinished tasks:
I need to finish that note.
I still need to add the billing.
I should update that medication.
I need to put that diagnosis into the chart.
I will come back to that encounter later.
One unfinished encounter may not feel significant. Ten unfinished encounters at 5 p.m. feel very different. The problem is that every unfinished visit requires you to reload its context. You have already thought through the patient once.
When you return hours later, you have to think through part of the encounter again. That is duplicated cognitive work. A better workflow aims to complete the major administrative components while you are still in the encounter:
Scribe → review note → update relevant chart information → review billing → fill encounter fields → sign off.
Then move to the next patient. This is also where the definition of an effective Med Access AI integration changes.
If your AI only produces a SOAP note, the physician may still have to complete several additional jobs. The note is done. But the encounter is not. A more integrated workflow can assist with the different administrative tasks surrounding the same visit.
Charting done before the patient leaves the room.
Medulla works inside Med Access and Oscar-based EMRs, on the encounter you already have open.
No credit card required.