AI medical scribes

Thanks to AI, doctors no longer need to write summaries—clinical notes—of patient exams. Now, scribe applications, installed on their phones, will do the job. The apps eavesdrop on their conversations with patients, synthesize the information, and produce a polished document with the details, structure, and tone of a proper clinical note—notes with no typos, proper grammar, and written in complete sentences.  After the apps produce the notes, the doctors read, correct—if necessary—and sign them.

AI scribes not only relieve doctors of a tedious chore, they also make it possible for doctors to focus their attention on the patient instead of a computer screen. (Doctors also find that the AI scribes increase productivity and revenue.) What’s not to like?

Companies, many of them start-ups, create and sell the apps to medical facilities. They’ve raised nearly $5 billion since 2019. So far, the rate of adoption has reached as high as 80 percent in some clinics and departments. It’s been the fastest-adopted medical technology of all time.

One doctor, while initially thrilled, found that, by letting the AI scribe write the note, she was “no longer thinking through the interaction with a patient and the meaning of the information” she had gathered—that the writing process itself helped her formulate her medical decision-making. Her cognitive labor was being “offloaded to a machine.”

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about the rise in medical scribes: humans who accompany the physician during an exam and enter the relevant information into the computer. At that time, it was the fastest growing healthcare profession in the nation. I suppose most of those people are now looking for work.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.