The first week with any ambient documentation tool is the week you train it on yourself. Done well, you finish the week editing almost nothing. Done poorly, you spend three months editing the same things over and over.
This guide is a checklist for the first five clinic days with AriaMD. Each day takes 5 to 10 extra minutes beyond your normal documentation time. By Friday, the drafts are 80 to 90 percent of the way to your final note for routine visit types.
Day 1: just chart the way you would
Do not try to optimize anything on day one. Run Aria on every visit. Edit the drafts as you would normally edit any draft. The system is recording the diff between what it produced and what you signed off on, and that diff is the cleanest possible signal of “this is what I actually wanted.” Trying to optimize on day one wastes the signal.
End-of-day checklist:
- Did you run Aria on every routine visit. (Yes is the goal.)
- Did you edit drafts to match how you actually chart. (Yes.)
- Were any drafts so far off that you discarded them and started over. (If yes, note which visit type and we will look at it on day three.)
Time spent: zero extra minutes. Just chart normally.
Day 2: notice what you are editing repeatedly
After the second day of edits, patterns appear. You will catch yourself making the same change two or three times. Some examples from real users:
- “Changing ‘patient denies suicidal ideation’ to ‘no SI reported’ every time.”
- “Moving the medication list from inside the HPI to its own line.”
- “Reformatting the MSE from a paragraph to bullet points.”
- “Changing ‘follow-up in 4 weeks’ to ‘RTC 4 weeks.’”
Write the patterns down. Three to five repeated edits is typical. End-of-day checklist:
- List the 3 to 5 corrections you made repeatedly today.
- Decide which of them are stylistic preferences (the system can learn these) vs. structural preferences (better handled with a template setting).
Time spent: 5 minutes at end of day.
Day 3: turn structural preferences into settings
Open your Nextvisit settings page. The style preferences exposed there are the structural levers: bullet vs paragraph for MSE, “no reported” vs “patient denies” phrasing, default follow-up format, and whether the assessment renders as a numbered list or as prose.
Set these once. Everything that was a recurring structural correction gets handled at the system level instead of your edit pass. End-of-day checklist:
- Style preferences updated to match how you chart.
- Edits today decreased compared to days 1 and 2. (Should be visibly true.)
- Any recurring corrections that are not addressable as settings: those are stylistic and the system is learning them.
Time spent: 10 minutes.
Day 4: build your first custom template
Most clinicians have one or two visit types that do not match the default templates exactly. New-patient intake with a specific structure. A return visit with a particular set of questions you always ask. A medication-management follow-up with a fixed format.
Day 4 is for one of these. Open the template editor, paste in a sample of how you actually write the visit (anonymized), and let the system convert it into a reusable template. Apply the template to your next two or three visits of that type and edit the drafts. The third pass should be very close to your final note.
End-of-day checklist:
- One custom template imported and refined.
- That template applied to at least two visits.
- Edits on those visits trending toward minimal.
Time spent: 15 minutes for setup, time saved on every future visit of that type.
Day 5: review what you have and tune
Friday is for reviewing the week. Open the personalization summary in your settings (Nextvisit shows you the active style preferences in plain English). Verify that the inferred preferences match how you actually chart. Edit anything that does not match. Reset and retrain anything that has gone in the wrong direction.
End-of-day checklist:
- Active style preferences match how you chart.
- You have at least one custom template running.
- Editing time per draft is meaningfully lower than day 1.
- Anything that is still consistently wrong is in your support ticket queue or a question for your account team.
Time spent: 10 minutes.
What week 2 looks like
Most providers report that by week 2, the editing time per chart is down 50 to 70 percent from day 1. Stylistic personalization continues to compound. By month 1, custom templates handle the visit types that the defaults do not, and most edits are factual additions or specific phrase tweaks rather than structural rewrites.
The first week is where the leverage is. 5 to 10 minutes per day for five days is the difference between a tool that mostly works and a tool that disappears into the workflow.