At your next appointment, your doctor may have a new kind of assistant listening in: artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Across the nation, A.I. programs are quietly recording these conversations and turning them into draft medical notes. These tools, known as A.I. scribes, are becoming more popular, with about 30 percent of U.S. doctors<\/a> using them to document patient encounters.<\/p>\n For physicians, the appeal is obvious. Doctors spend roughly 2.3 hours<\/a> on paperwork for every 8 hours of patient care. Several trials<\/a> have found<\/a> that A.I. scribes can ease doctors\u2019 documentation burden, reducing stress and burnout.<\/p>\n But what do A.I. scribes mean for patients? The hope is that they will help doctors pay better attention during visits; shorten waits for appointments<\/a>; and produce more thorough notes, said Dr. Paul Lukac, chief A.I. officer at U.C.L.A. Health. But there has been little research on how A.I. scribes are affecting patient care.<\/p>\n The popularity of scribes has also raised concerns about privacy, consent and accuracy. So we asked experts what patients should know.<\/p>\n What is actually being stored?<\/p>\n Every health care organization and A.I. scribe company has its own rules, but in general, the audio and transcript of the appointment are only temporarily stored with the company \u2014 typically deleted within a few weeks or months. At U.C.L.A. Health, for instance, they are kept for 14 days, Dr. Lukac said, while Microsoft says its Dragon Copilot tool, a popular A.I. scribe, stores the files for up to 90 days<\/a>.<\/p>\n Only the draft note remains in your electronic medical record, along with whatever edits your doctor may have made to it, said Dr. Majid Afshar, a pulmonary and critical care doctor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In other words, no raw A.I. notes, transcripts or recordings should be kept on file long-term.<\/p>\n Patients have the right to access their records and see all the notes, but they typically don\u2019t have access to the audio recording and transcript, Dr. Afshar added.<\/p>\n You can always ask the doctor if you can record the appointment yourself. This is already common practice in some specialties like oncology, said Dr. Michael Turken, an internal medicine physician at University of California San Francisco Health, where there\u2019s often a lot of complex information exchanged quickly.<\/p>\n Will doctors ask for my consent?<\/p>\n In most states, only one party needs to consent to a recording, so doctors may not legally be required to tell you they\u2019re using an A.I. scribe. But in practice, your doctor will most likely ask for your consent beforehand, said Sharona Hoffman, a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, given the importance of trust and transparency in medicine.<\/p>\n But, because of time constraints, the consent process might be simplified. For example, doctors might ask only if you mind if they use a tool to help take notes, Dr. Turken said, instead of clearly disclosing that they\u2019re creating an audio recording of the appointment.<\/p>\n However, you can always say no or ask to pause the recording during sensitive parts of an appointment. Doctors know that some patients will hold back if they know they\u2019re being recorded, and they do not want that.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you have any feeling whatsoever that you\u2019re not going to feel comfortable saying everything you need to say, tell the doctor not to record,\u201d Dr. Turken said.<\/p>\n Should I be worried about privacy?<\/p>\n While A.I. scribe companies have access to the visit recording, these companies are typically bound by HIPAA, the federal health privacy law, through a contract with the health system. Some contracts may allow your data to be anonymized and then used to train the A.I. model, but in general, most health systems will have very strong security protections in place for data collected and generated by A.I. scribes, Dr. Turken said.<\/p>\n Health information is always a target for hackers because it is sensitive and hard to replace. But the information collected and generated by A.I. scribes isn\u2019t necessarily any more exposed than other medical data, Dr. Hoffman said.<\/p>\n The privacy risk is greater if doctors use A.I. scribes without a formal contract \u2014 for example, choosing a tool outside a hospital\u2019s approved system or using one when their practice hasn\u2019t approved any scribe at all, Dr. Lukac said. In these cases, the scribe company would be bound only by its own terms and services, not HIPAA.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re worried about privacy, Dr. Lukac recommends asking your doctors if they have a HIPAA contract with the A.I. scribe company \u2014 officially called a business associate agreement \u2014 before they start recording.<\/p>\n Should I check the A.I.-generated note?<\/p>\n The A.I. scribe\u2019s note isn\u2019t supposed to slide into your medical record untouched; the clinician has to review and sign off on it, taking responsibility for its accuracy, Dr. Hoffman said.<\/p>\n That matters because errors do happen. When transcribing, these tools might miss details or mix up who said what, Dr. Turken said, especially if multiple people are speaking.<\/p>\n Accents and dialects can be a particular weak spot for scribes: In a small 2024 study<\/a>, researchers tested four A.I. transcription programs, and all had lower accuracy for Black patients than white patients. There\u2019s also evidence that transcription errors are more common for non-native English speakers<\/a>.<\/p>\n And even when the transcript is accurate, the A.I. tool can omit relevant information and introduce inaccuracies when drafting the note. In a test of five different A.I. scribes during simulated patient encounters, researchers found that, on average, every note had three potentially serious errors<\/a>. Dr. Lukac similarly led a trial at the University of California, Los Angeles, where A.I. scribes were used in over 15,000 visits, and he found that doctors reported clinically significant inaccuracies \u201coccasionally<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n For patients, it\u2019s probably just best to check all the notes in your medical record for accuracy, because human-written notes can also contain errors, Dr. Turken said.<\/p>\n That safeguard may become more important as A.I. scribes become more routinely used. Companies are also building features to help with billing, to tee up medication orders and to guide clinical decision-making, making it crucial that doctors continue to scrutinize what the software produces.<\/p>\n Just remember that if you have any qualms about A.I. scribes, you can say no: \u201cWe still have the ability to type on keyboards,\u201d Dr. Lukac said, \u201cand write pretty good notes ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At your next appointment, your doctor may have a new kind of assistant listening in: artificial intelligence. 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