The widespread investment in AI furthers economists’ optimism about a “roaring 20’s” of worker productivity on the horizon. However, this will not take place in health care without accompanying systemic and organizational actions that rethink what we financially incentivize, how we integrate new technologies, how we shift tasks, and how we prepare the workforce.
Two years ago, every health conference I attended had multiple panels on clinician burnout. The problem is well known, and the actual system-level contributors have been called out.
In the last year, the solution to burnout is splashed on every conference app log-in screen: generative artificial intelligence (AI).
The AI scribe revolution
In health care, ambient documentation tools have become the star of the show. These “AI scribes” listen to the patient-physician conversation, transcribe the discussion, and then use generative AI to create a first draft clinical note. These solutions remove the laborious work of fully capturing the patient’s story or the physician’s thoughts about the plan. This technology is seen by some as a miracle. Before large language model chat applications were popularized, many physicians did not think such solutions were possible during our careers.
Conflicting visions for AI’s impact
Organizational leaders are stoked about the future AI can potentially create. There are endless administrative inefficiencies that affect patient care or inflate costs.
Frontline clinicians are still quite wary. Their concerns stem from the technology itself and also from what organizational or system leaders will do with the new efficiencies gained from the deployment of such technology. Those next steps – the policy changes and operational actions that follow broad AI scribe implementations — are the critical pieces that will determine its success.
Will organizations simply continue to add more patients and more tasks to physicians’ plates? Will we slot generative AI solutions into existing clinic processes that may not serve clinicians’ ideal workflow? Will we integrate these generative AI tools into EHR systems that do not support physicians’ thought patterns or desired storytelling purposes?
read the original unedited piece at https://medcitynews.com/2025/06/beyond-technology-aligning-ai-tools-with-systemic-change-in-healthcare/
Via nrip
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