AI-assisted EHR documentation will need human help

Although AI documentation assistants will likely be integral to future primary care consultations, they’ll still need to be supervised by a human. Artificial intelligence technologies are being increasingly relied upon in the healthcare domain, particularly when it comes to decision support, precision medicine, and the improvement of the quality of care. Regarding primary care specifically, AI also represents an opportunity to assist with electronic health record documentation.

A new study published in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association this week shows that, although AI documentation assistants (or digital scribes) offer great potential in the primary care setting, they will need to be supervised by a human until strong evidence is available for their autonomous potential.

In workshops with primary care doctors, wrote researchers from the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, “There was consensus that consultations of the future would increasingly involve more automated and AI-supported systems. However, there were differing views on how this human-AI collaboration would work, what roles doctors and AI would take, and what tasks could be delegated to AI.”