Here's the honest answer up front: no one has published a rigorous time-motion study of veterinary documentation. The "vets spend 25–40% of their day on records" figures that circulate online trace back to vendor marketing, not primary research. The closest properly measured numbers come from human medicine, where the workflow is structurally identical — and they're sobering: clinicians spend 49.2% of the office day on records and desk work versus 27% face-to-face with patients, plus 1–2 hours more every night, and 91% do at least some documentation outside working hours. On the veterinary side, what's actually verified is the consequence: burnout remains high, with workload and staff shortages among the drivers. This article separates what's measured from what's marketed — and shows you how to get the one number that actually matters: your own.
The numbers everyone quotes — and where they actually come from
Search this question and you'll find confident figures everywhere: "veterinarians spend 30–40% of working hours on documentation," "2.8 hours daily," "1–3 hours per day after appointments." Follow the citations, though, and they loop between AI-scribe vendor blogs citing each other, or point to surveys that were never published anywhere you can check.
We sell an AI scribe ourselves, so let's be clear about the incentive: every vendor in this market (us included) benefits from the biggest possible number. That's exactly why a stats page like this one should only contain figures you can trace to a primary source. The honest state of the evidence: the veterinary-specific number hasn't been rigorously measured. What we have instead is very good measurement from a directly analogous profession, and solid veterinary data on the downstream effects.
What rigorous measurement actually shows
The benchmark study is Sinsky et al., published in the Annals of Internal Medicine: a time-and-motion study where trained observers followed 57 physicians across four specialties for 430 clinic hours — not a survey, actual stopwatches. The result:
For every hour of direct patient face time, roughly two hours went to records and desk work — and that's during the office day, before anyone went home. The 21 physicians who kept after-hours diaries logged another 1–2 hours each night, mostly on records.
Can you map this straight onto a veterinary consult day? Not exactly — consult lengths, support staffing, and record systems differ. But the structure of the work is the same: a conversation with a client, an examination, and a structured note owed afterwards. There is no obvious reason veterinary documentation should be dramatically cheaper than human-medicine documentation — and anyone who has closed a clinic at 19:00 with six notes still open knows it isn't.
After hours: the best-documented part of the problem
The single best-measured fact in this whole topic is when the documentation happens. The CDC's National Electronic Health Records Survey asked office-based physicians how much time they spent documenting outside normal office hours:
Ninety-one percent documented outside working hours; a third spent more than two hours a day doing it. Medicine even has a name for it — "pajama time."
On the veterinary side, the effects of this workload are well documented even where the minutes aren't. The Merck Animal Health Veterinarian Wellbeing Study III (2,495 veterinarians, published in JAVMA) found burnout "remained at a high level," with wellbeing declining over the pandemic years, driven in part by "extreme labor shortages" — and support staff scoring worse than veterinarians on every wellbeing measure. We've covered the veterinary burnout research, and what unfinished notes have to do with it, in why SOAP notes drift into your evenings.
What actually reduces documentation time
Because the honest baseline comes from human medicine, the honest improvement data does too:
- Templates are the cheapest win. The AVMA's practical advice is to build note templates in your own voice for your commonest visit types — editing beats composing. We've published eight copy-ready veterinary SOAP templates to start from.
- Ambient AI scribes show measured, moderate gains — concentrated in heavy users. The largest study to date (1,800 clinicians vs 6,770 controls, in JAMA) found average savings of 13 minutes of EHR time and 16 minutes of documentation time per day — but clinicians who used the scribe on more than half their visits saw triple the documentation-time reduction. A tool you use on every consult beats a tool you use occasionally.
- The biggest measured effect is on after-hours work. In a six-health-system study in JAMA Network Open, 30 days of ambient scribe use cut after-hours documentation by 0.9 hours per day and dropped burnout from 51.9% to 38.8%. The gain isn't mainly "more patients per day" — it's getting your evening back.
- Method matters less than workload fit. Typing, dictation and ambient scribes each attack a different part of the job — we've compared them, with the same studies, in AI scribe vs dictation vs typing.
Measure your own clinic in one week
The number that should drive your decisions isn't in any study — it's in your practice management system. Here's the minimal version, no consultants required:
- Pick a normal week. For each vet, note the time the last consult ends and the time the last record is signed, every day. That gap is your after-hours documentation number.
- Count open notes at close. Each day at closing time, count consults from that day with unfinished records. Trend beats precision.
- Time five routine notes end-to-end. From opening the record to signing it — including the "what was that lump again?" pauses. Multiply by your daily consult count for the honest total.
Three data points, one week, and you'll know whether documentation is costing your clinic thirty minutes or three hours per vet per day — and whether it's happening on the clock or on the sofa. If the number surprises you, that's the moment to look at templates, workflow changes, or a scribe trial — in that order of cheapness.
The bottom line
- The viral "vets spend X% on paperwork" numbers are marketing, not measurement — ours would be too, so we're not quoting one.
- The best-measured analogous data says records eat about half the clinical day plus 1–2 hours at night, and that 91% of clinicians document after hours.
- Veterinary-verified evidence confirms the consequence: persistently high burnout with workload as a driver.
- The measured fixes — templates and consistently-used ambient scribes — mainly buy back evenings, which the wellbeing research suggests is exactly the time that matters most.