Daniel Peters, M.D., assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Larner College of Medicine, and Anne Morris, M.D., associate professor of family medicine, a physician at UVM Health, and the associate dean of Larner College of Medicine’s primary care residency, are among several Vermont doctors interviewed by VTDigger about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in health care.
Advocates for the use of AI in health care say it has been essential to reducing the burden of paperwork and the high levels of clinician burnout that result from it, and better yet, it allows them to focus on the truly human parts of medicine. Still, some worry about how to afford the expensive technology and about the risks of over-reliance on it for medical decision-making.
Dr. Peters says the AI scribe he uses has been game changing as he dashes from patient to patient in the emergency department with a running list in his mind.
Dr. Morris describes how profoundly the technology has lessened the psychological weight of doctors’ never-ending administrative to-do list. Using the AI scribe technology has become second nature, she says. It has whittled down the amount of work time that spills out of normal clinic hours and into the evenings. “It helps to take away some of that existential exhaustion,” she said.
In the emergency department, Peters has felt the same thing: The technology has driven him to articulate his thoughts more clearly and talk his patients through his decisions even more than before, he said. There’s this underlying incentive that, the more he communicates aloud, the easier his documentation will be later.
A report from the medical technology company Doximity found that more than 36% of clinicians who use AI see it reducing the amount of time that they spend working outside regular hours, and that of 3,151 physicians surveyed in the U.S., 54% use AI technology in some way in their practice. The most frequent use, Doximity found, is in doing a literature search (that’s 35% of those using it). The second most popular use is for AI scribe technology.
The ethics, cost, and security of the technology are real concerns that are always at front of mind as these AI systems are rolled out.