While artificial intelligence tools that generate clinical notes are changing how doctors document patient visits, humans still do it better, researchers reported in San Francisco during the American College of Physicians annual meeting.
“Ambient AI scribes” work quietly in the background, “listening” to doctor-patient conversations and summarizing the encounter in clinical notes. The primary goal is to cut down on paperwork and give doctors more time to focus on patient care.
In practice, the technology has shown potential. Studies have found that AI scribes can cut down on documentation time, reduce after-hours work, and even help doctors feel more engaged during appointments, the researchers noted.
But the study published in Annals of Internal Medicine found advantages for humans over AI, especially in areas like thoroughness, organization, and clinical usefulness.
The researchers had 11 different AI scribe systems and 18 human doctors generate patient notes from recordings of five simulated clinical visits that included background noise, masked speakers, and non-native accents.
Thirty reviewers assessed the results without knowing who wrote them. Across the board, human-written notes came out on top, with significant differences in scenarios involving back pain, chest pain, and heart failure, the researchers found.
Challenging conditions, such as noisy environments or muffled speech, made it harder for the AI systems to keep up, the researchers also found.
“AI scribes should be regarded as tools for generating draft documentation that requires review and editing, rather than as a substitute for clinician-authored notes,” the authors wrote.
