A few months ago, I received email notification at work that indicated our phones would soon be automatically downloading a generic, HIPAA-compliant artificial intelligence (AI) scribe. I was intrigued. Could an AI scribe really get all the complexities of an emergency department (ED) encounter? How would it know what to leave in—and sometimes more importantly—what to leave out?

Testing Out New Tech

With all this in mind, I tried out the generic AI scribe. I first tried it with my husband. He pretended to be a physician, and I pretended to be a nightmare historian. I’m referring to the type of person who rambles about pickleball when you are asking them about their chest pain and has a hard time staying on track. The result was surprisingly good; the program omitted non-medical information and provided a succinct non-judgmental history. I tried it next at work, with less success. I found that the generic AI scribe didn’t have as much detail as I would have wanted in some areas. It also included certain information that was extraneous or worded in a way that I did not appreciate, such as describing all pain as “severe.” I ended up spending more time editing the document than it would have taken to just come up with my own history via dictation.

So, for now, I’m not switching over. But I am impressed. I don’t doubt that AI will continue to improve, and there might be a day where AI could replace traditional ED scribes.

The profession of scribing dates to Mesopotamia and the beginnings of human civilization. Scribes have been essential throughout history in keeping a variety of documents, including historical records, legal codes, copying manuscripts, and texts. This isn’t the first time where scribes’ jobs have been challenged by modern inventions. The advent of the printing press 585 years ago caused a significant decrease in the prominence and use of scribes. However, in the past several years with the release of the electronic medical record, there has been a boom in the use of medical scribes to help with the burden of increased clinical documentation.

The American College of Medical Scribes estimated an increase in 80,000 scribes between 2015 and 2020.¹ Medical scribes have been shown to be beneficial to emergency physicians in terms of billing and coding, physician satisfaction, improved documentation in the emergency department, and patient volume.^2,3 Surveyed ED scribes have also described benefits of experiencing being a scribe in terms of mentorship, increased clinical experience and medical knowledge, and improved chances of getting into medical school.⁴