Note time-to-sign calculator

How each figure is built

Covered notes are notes per day multiplied by the coverage percentage. Minutes saved per clinician per day is covered notes multiplied by the difference between the two per-note times. Hours per clinician per year applies working days and divides by sixty. Organisation hours multiply by headcount. The full-time equivalent line divides organisation hours by the annual clinical hours figure you set, and that figure is an input because every establishment defines it differently and a borrowed definition quietly changes the headline.

Assumptions and limits

Hours saved are capacity, not cash. Converting hours into full-time equivalents does not mean those posts can be removed, and presenting the FTE figure as a saving is the fastest way to lose the clinical audience for the whole programme. Saved minutes arrive in small pieces across a day, and small pieces do not aggregate into a vacancy. They can shorten the evening work, absorb a session of backlog, or make a rota survivable. Decide which, and say so.

The model uses one average note. A discharge summary and a follow-up note are not the same work, and if the tool covers the fast notes and not the slow ones, the real saving is smaller than the average implies. It assumes the two per-note times were measured the same way, on the same definition of when the clock starts. It assumes the difference holds steady, where in practice it moves as templates change, as clinicians learn what to dictate, and as the tool is updated underneath you. It says nothing about note quality, length, coding accuracy or what a reviewer would make of the resulting record, and a shorter time to sign is not by itself a better note. It excludes the time the tool costs elsewhere, the informatics support, the corrections, the escalations.

If your minutes to sign come from a vendor rather than your own audit log, treat them as a claim rather than a measurement, and run this page again at half the difference to see whether the case still holds.

Nothing here is a clinical, safety or regulatory claim, and nothing here is a statement about any particular product.

What this does not tell you

It cannot tell you whether a vendor's own time-to-sign numbers are evidenced. That is a separate question with a separate method, and the scoring we use for it is published at how we score vendors, including what separates an asserted figure from a verified one.

If you need the full instrument, with the documentation quality audit rubric that should run alongside any time-to-sign measurement, that lives in the Clinical Documentation and Ambient AI Toolkit.