Research conducted at UC San Diego Health on the types of editing that physicians across various specialties made to AI-generated drafts of patient messages provides some early evidence about physicians\u2019 roles as humans-in-the-loop and offers some direction for AI optimization efforts.<\/p>\n
In 2025 researchers used a year\u2019s worth of AI-drafted replies to patient messages generated by a system deployed to over 1,000 physicians at UC San Diego Health. They analyzed physician edits to AI-generated draft responses integrated in the Epic EHR. They then created a 15-category taxonomy of edits using a large language model with iterative expert review. Response time was used as a proxy for clinical workload and examined in relation to edit categories with mixed-effects regression, adjusting for message complexity and temporal factors. Their findings were published in NEJM AI.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n The researchers found that all 15 edit categories were associated with longer response times. The most frequent edits involved scheduling or rescheduling appointments (38.5%), followed by providing lifestyle or non-pharmacologic guidance (18.2%) and providing empathy or emotional support (16.1%). The least frequent category was discontinuing or tapering prescription medications (2.4%).\u00a0<\/p>\n The largest marginal increases were observed for interpreting radiology results (+70.1%), clarifying or ruling out diagnosis (+63.9%), and interpreting laboratory results (+60.8%).<\/p>\n In the discussion session of their paper, the authors state that \u201cthe findings show that editing burden is not uniformly distributed: Edits requiring clinical judgment impose the greatest per-message time burden, while high-frequency administrative edits contributed the greatest cumulative workload across the health system.\u201d<\/p>\n The UC San Diego team notes that to date time savings from these systems have not yet consistently materialized in practice; therefore, understanding where and why physicians modify AI-generated content is a first step to realizing their value for both clinicians and patients.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Research conducted at UC San Diego Health on the types of editing that physicians across various specialties made…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467604,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[74,76,75],"class_list":["post-467603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}