Smart Phrases aka "Snippets" | pMD
A documentation acceleration feature for doctors, designed before the AI-assisted writing era
A medical billing customer, a practicing physician, was spending too much time on patient documentation. She asked if pMD could speed up the most repetitive parts of charting.
I partnered directly with her and our engineering lead to design a solution. The initial concept was ambitious: an AI-powered phrase completion system that would learn commonly used language as doctors typed and suggest it back to them automatically. This was 2021, well before ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the AI writing tools that exist today. The capability we wanted was real, but the technical foundation wasn't there yet.
So we scoped down. Instead of training a system to learn doctors' writing patterns automatically, I designed a feature built on manually-saved snippets that could be dropped in later. We called them "Snippets".
The interaction had to feel native to the existing charting workflow without forcing doctors to learn anything new. I designed Snippets to activate inline, mid-text, with keyboard-first navigation (Tab and arrow keys) so doctors could stay on the keyboard and out of the mouse.
The hardest design problem: two UI systems.
pMD was mid-transition between an older desktop interface and a modern redesign. I was designing Snippets for both, which meant every interaction had to feel native in two different visual languages.
I leaned the design toward the newer UI language but adjusted it carefully to feel balanced in the older interface. It worked, but the effort exposed something I needed to escalate.
What I learned: when to stop compromising.
Designing for two systems in parallel wasn't sustainable. Every new feature would face the same compromise, and the design debt was compounding. I made the call to push up the ladder. We couldn't keep building for both. The newer system needed to win.
This was the lesson the project really gave me: design judgment isn't just about solving the problem in front of you. Sometimes the right move is to recognize that the problem itself is the wrong shape, and to argue for changing it.
The outcome.
Snippets received strong feedback from our pilot customer and validated the underlying need. The feature was rolled back to internal use when the customer left pMD for unrelated reasons, and documentation deprioritized as the company focused elsewhere. Today, with documentation back on the roadmap, Snippets is positioned to be revisited.
Five years later, AI-assisted writing tools are everywhere. This project was an early attempt at the same idea, built within the technical constraints of its time, for a specialized workflow that general-purpose AI tools still don't address well.