Physicians embrace AI note-taking technology: ‘There is literally no other intervention in our field that impacts burnout to this extent’

My parents are MDs in the US. In the early aughts, they used to do dictations after meeting with parents. I think they just included the tapes with their other medical records. When their system switched to electronic records, they had to type everything. They tried to use this TTS software called Dragon, but it wasn't really optimized for medical jargon. I remember seeing my mom cry because for a while, it seemed like all she did when she was home was try to catch up on charting. I think on top of that, the early EMR systems were not very user-friendly, which made things take longer.

A big part of the problem is that theur hospital system didn't properly allocate time for them to chart, so the transition to EMR essentially just meant any loss of efficiency turned into homework. Having a much more standardized format that required everything to be typed instead of spoken required a greater investment of time. And on top of that, their job is to treat patients, not spend all day note-taking.

Some doctors have professional "scribes". The place my parents worked just never found room in the budget for scribes for my parents.

2 comments

It’s really that difficult to listen to patients and take notes?
- My parents are MDs in the US. In the early aughts, they used to do dictations after meeting with parents. I think they just included the tapes with their other medical records. When their system switched to electronic records, they had to type everything. They tried to use this TTS software called Dragon, but it wasn't really optimized for medical jargon. I remember seeing my mom cry because for a while, it seemed like all she did when she was home was try to catch up on charting. I think on top of that, the early EMR systems were not very user-friendly, which made things take longer.
  A big part of the problem is that theur hospital system didn't properly allocate time for them to chart, so the transition to EMR essentially just meant any loss of efficiency turned into homework. Having a much more standardized format that required everything to be typed instead of spoken required a greater investment of time. And on top of that, their job is to treat patients, not spend all day note-taking.
  Some doctors have professional "scribes". The place my parents worked just never found room in the budget for scribes for my parents.