After the University of California San Francisco’s health system rolled out similar technology for their doctors, the response has been “ecstatic,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine and author of the upcoming book, “A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.”
“The comments are unlike anything I’ve seen in technology and health care where people usually complain about the technology,” he said. “The comments are, ‘I was thinking about retiring until this came out.’”
The health systems say the technology will become a normal part of doctors’ offices in the future.
However, the tools can still make mistakes, and some doctors have mixed feelings about them.
Researchers at Penn Medicine recently published a journal article describing how 46 doctors across 17 specialties felt about the AI tool after using it for a few weeks late last year. When the researchers asked the doctors whether they would recommend it to their colleagues, half the group said yes, whereas the other half said no. Some said the automated note-taking makes them more efficient; whereas others said they have to spend time editing the AI-generated notes to make them fit their usual style.
Dr. Corinne Rhodes, a general medicine practitioner with the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, uses an ambient listening tool on her phone to take notes during patient visits. (Emma Lee/WHYY)
That’s the case for Dr. Corinne Rhodes, a primary care physician at Penn Medicine. She used the AI listening program in a recent patient visit.
She explained that she’s developed a system of writing concise notes after years of experience, and now needs to heavily edit parts of what the AI generates for her. However, she expects the program to get better in the future, to the point where it will consistently save her hours, so she wants to start learning it now.
Dr. Corinne Rhodes, a general medicine practitioner with the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, consults Open Evidence, a medical information platform that uses artificial intelligence to aggregate and synthesize medical research. (Emma Lee/WHYY)
Kevin Johnson, a professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, said some doctors already expect these tools to be available.
“We’re already finding that there are health care providers who are asking for it as a condition of employment,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘If I come, I really want to have access to ambient scribing,’ because they’ve already seen what the detriment of not having it looks like.”
He was a part of the research team that found doctors had mixed reactions to using the AI note-taking program, and pointed out that since the time of the surveys, program developers have released several updates to improve the software.