As we approach the end of 2024, First Opinion is publishing a series of essays on the state of AI in medicine and biopharma.
Get a group of primary care physicians together, and there’s a pretty good chance they will start talking about the potential of AI scribes to reduce documentation burden and improve the clinician-patient office interaction. These programs use ambient listening to record clinician-patient interactions and generative AI to filter extraneous conversation and compose cogent progress notes. There is an ever-growing list of companies and start-ups actively marketing these tools to medical practices.
While AI scribes score high on the “wow” scale, I worry that they are 1) not solving the exam room problems that are most tedious and time-consuming, 2) like any type of scribe, reinforcing our electronic health record-exacerbated obsession with elaborate chart notes, and 3) creating a new task of reviewing and editing imperfect AI-generated text.
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