The assistants who write up medical notes do not pick up on body language or emotions, and prioritise clinical information over the patient’s account. They could also undermine doctors’ memory and reasoning.
About 40% of British GPs say they use ambient AI "scribes", who listen to the consultation and draw a structured note from it. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh reviewed 27 articles on their adoption, in a review published in September in BMJ Digital Health & AI. Their finding: the literature has been mainly interested in accuracy and time saved, much less in making these tools change in the care relationship.
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These systems convert speech into text: they do not perceive facial expressions, gestures, or emotional states, which inform the clinician. Their summaries favor medical information to the detriment of the patient's account of his or her illness. And knowing that they are recorded, some patients may not be able to keep sensitive topics such as addictions, domestic violence or mental health quiet.
On the doctors' side, delegating note-taking frees up time for exchange, but can weaken memory and the learning of clinical reasoning: some no longer recognize their own notes or no longer remember the patient at the next consultation. The authors, led by Lucas Seuren, call for these tools to preserve the patient's voice and for their medium- and long-term effects to be studied before large-scale deployment.
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