Early afternoon in a family practice in Sarajevo, Zagreb or Belgrade looks much the same: the clinic’s system is open, there is a queue in the waiting room, and the clock does not stop. The time with the patient is short, and the documentation that did not fit into the day is finished after the shift. AI tools aim at exactly that gap, with very different approaches. This guide describes four kinds of tools you will meet in 2026 and what to ask before you pick one.
Where the time goes
There are no published measurements for clinics in Bosnia, Croatia or Serbia. The most cited measurement from elsewhere comes from a study that followed 57 physicians in four specialties in the United States. During working hours they spent 27.0% of their time directly with patients and 49.2% on the electronic record and desk work (Sinsky et al., Annals of Internal Medicine, 2016). The exact share differs from clinic to clinic. The pattern is the same: writing the report is a large part of the job.
Four kinds of tools
1. Dictation with structuring. You dictate, the tool transcribes, and the text is arranged into the template of your specialty. This is the most predictable category: the shortest learning curve and the smallest change to how you already work. It is where most doctors who try AI for the first time start.
2. Recording the conversation. The tool listens to the whole visit, separates your voice from the patient’s and turns the conversation into text in a template. It is demanding in our region: patients speak in dialect, doctors mix Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian with Latin and English terms, and clinics are noisy. It works best on routine visits in a quiet room, and less well on complex specialist consultations. The patient must know the conversation is being recorded.
3. Notes into a report. During the exam you jot down short points, and the tool expands them into a complete report. It suits follow-up visits for chronic conditions and quick notes between patients that you finish later.
4. Discharge letters and long summaries. Here the tool drafts a letter from existing documentation, and the doctor edits and signs. The catch is the source: without a link to the hospital system or a structured input, the data has to be copied by hand, and that removes most of the benefit.
AiMED Dictate covers the first two: dictation and conversation recording with speaker separation, written into the template of your specialty.
What changed compared with older dictation software
Older desktop dictation programs were built for English and German, needed local installation and were hard to maintain in a small clinic. Today’s tools run in the browser, work on several devices, and a language model arranges the text afterwards. That is why a dictation does not have to be perfect: you speak at a natural pace, and the sections of the report are filled in afterwards.
Questions to ask a vendor
- Does it understand the language I actually use? Test it with Latin terms, mixed languages and your own dialect. More on this in how AI understands Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian medical language.
- Where is the dictation processed, and is it stored? AiMED Dictate processes dictation in the EU and does not store it. The report stays in your system, and the doctor signs it.
- Where does the text end up? If you write in your clinic’s EHR, ask whether the text can go straight into the report field, or whether you copy it from window to window. AiMED Dictate has a web browser extension that enters text into the report field, installed together with you.
- Who has the last word? A documentation tool writes down what you said. It does not diagnose and does not suggest therapy, and you review every report before you sign it.
- How much do you have to change? A tool that demands a big change in how you work rarely survives the first month.
Choosing for your workflow
Start with the category that solves your biggest time problem, not with the most impressive one. A conversation recorder is striking in a demo, but for a doctor who spends most of the day on follow-up visits, dictation into a template is probably more useful. A simple tool for the right problem is worth more than a sophisticated tool for the wrong one.
A test you can do in one afternoon
Dictate five of the reports you write most often, at your natural pace. Count the corrections in each one. Measure the time from the end of dictation to a report ready to sign, and compare it with your usual way of writing. If most reports need only a few small fixes, the tool fits your language. If every report needs rewriting, it does not, however good the demo looked.
That is why we show AiMED Dictate on a report from your own specialty: get in touch and we will set up your template with you.
