You’re at the doctor’s office, sitting on the itchy, crinkly paper on the examination bed for longer than you wanted to. Your family doctor finally knocks on your door, and you’re anxious to explain your reason for booking an appointment. But as you start speaking, the doctor is glued to his or her computer, typing furiously and rarely ever looking up. They’re taking notes as they listen, but the lack of engagement causes a disconnect. Artificial intelligence could provide a solution.
Doctors are starting to use ambient listening and AI scribes to take notes during medical visits, leaving them free to better interact with their patients, as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer. It comes as a number of studies published in the JAMA Network this year (February, August, and October) highlight the usefulness of such ambient AI scribes for physicians. Some experts, however, are raising red flags.
Doing doctors’ grunt work
Bracken Babula, a Jefferson Health primary care doctor, and Dina Francesca Capalongo, an internal medicine doctor at Penn Medicine, told the outlet that they use AI scribes to help with notetaking after asking their patients’ permission to record their conversation. The tool records the conversation and converts it into organized notes. It has helped both practitioners change the dynamic in their exam room, allowing them to be more engaged with the conversation and maintain eye contact.
These feelings are backed by research. An aforementioned study involving 46 participants linked the use of an ambient scribe tool with greater clinician efficiency, lower mental burden of documentation, and a heightened sense of engagement with patients.
As a professional whose career also once depended on intense note-taking, I understand the extreme convenience of such tools better than most. When I first started in journalism, I used to rarely look at my interviewees—I was too busy typing down their responses at the speed of light. When I finally found good transcribing tools, it was life-changing. With permission, I now record the conversation and then transcribe the audio file into text that I refer back to as I write my articles. That leaves me more brain space to be friendly, ask spontaneous questions, and respond appropriately to surprising answers.
Potential issues with AI in the exam room
There is a difference, however, between transcription and note-taking. The latter requires an understanding of what information is important enough to keep. If my transcription tools commit an error that makes it into the published article, we issue a correction. But if an AI scribe notes the wrong dosage, I imagine it could have serious consequences for the patient. The tools could also struggle with foreign accents and raise questions about privacy and medical malpractice cases, per The Philadelphia Inquirer. What’s more, healthcare systems would have to figure out what to do when patients don’t want something recorded.
“It puts a lot of onus on the health systems to be careful adopters and kick the tires,” I. Glenn Cohen, a bioethicist at Harvard Law School, told the outlet. It seems like the final judgement on AI use in the exam room will ultimately be determined by the guardrails and integration process implemented by healthcare systems.
What’s certain is that I and many of my former classmates would have given anything to use such a tool during my endless university lectures.