HBO’s TV series “The Pitt” has been praised as the most medically accurate television drama ever produced. Emergency physicians have lauded it for capturing the unique cacophony of the emergency department (ED): the overlapping crises, the claustrophobic tension, the impossible choices.

But as emergency physicians who study how technology shapes our work, we have noticed a glaring omission. The blood was there. The trauma was there. The adrenaline was there.

The typing is gone.

One of us watched the first season with a stopwatch. The protagonist, Dr. Robby (played by Noah Wyle), is on screen for hours. Yet, across 15 episodes, he sits at a computer for a total of about 13 minutes. In the world of “The Pitt,” doctors spend 95 percent of their time moving, thinking, and talking to patients.

In the second season, which premiered in 2026, reality finally intrudes in the form of Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (played by Sepideh Moafi)

Dr. Al-Hashimi is an expert in clinical informatics who arrives to replace Dr. Robby while he goes on sabbatical. She represents the “new” ethos of emergency medicine: data-driven, efficiency obsessed, and tethered to technology. Throughout the first two episodes, she clashes with Dr. Robby’s cowboy humanism, pushing for “patient passports” and new protocols.

But the conflict peaks at the end of the second episode, when she finally confronts him with the data. She argues for the use of generative AI [artificial intelligence], citing a study showing that emergency physicians spend 40 percent of their time charting.

Dr. Robby’s response is immediate and dismissive: “That doesn’t sound accurate.”

It was a throwaway line, but it inadvertently highlighted the central tragedy of American health care. Dr. Robby thinks the statistic sounds wrong because, in his fictional world, it is wrong. He lives in a nostalgic fantasy where doctors treat patients. We live in a reality where we treat the electronic health record.

Time-motion studies — real ones, with real stopwatches — consistently back up Dr. Al-Hashimi. Emergency physicians spend more time interacting with computers than with human beings.¹ One study found that for every hour we spend face-to-face with a patient, we spend nearly two hours feeding the digital beast.²

The show frames Dr. Al-Hashimi as the antagonist; the “informatics” buzzkill who lets data get in the way of the real work. But she is the only character telling the truth.

The modern medical record has metastasized into a tool for billing compliance and legal defense. We aren’t just noting that a patient has a fever; we are navigating a maze of drop-down menus, clicking 4,000 times per shift to satisfy insurance algorithms.¹

The show tries to solve this conflict with a magic wand. Dr. Al-Hashimi introduces an AI scribe — an app on her phone that listens to patient visits and writes the notes automatically. “Do you know how much time this will save,” she asks, promising that technology will finally liberate them.

This creates a dangerous new myth. It suggests that the problem with American medicine is that we just haven’t found the right app yet. It implies that if we just deploy enough generative AI, the computer will disappear, and we can all go back to being Dr. Robby.

But the problem isn’t that writing notes is hard. The problem is that the system demands we generate massive amounts of low-value text for billing reasons that have nothing to do with healing. AI might generate that text faster, but it doesn’t remove the cage, it just gilds the bars.

This distortion matters. When the public watches “The Pitt,” they see the visible scarcity of beds, of nurses, of time. But they miss the invisible scarcity: attention.

We have reached a point where technology, promised as a savior, has become a barrier. “The Pitt” gets the chaos right. But by having its hero deny the reality of the screen, it lets the audience off the hook. It depicts a version of medicine where the doctor’s eyes are fixed on the patient, not the monitor.

For those of us working real shifts tonight, staring at the glow of a screen while a patient waits in the dark, that is the most painful fiction of all.

Dr. Preiksaitis is a clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at Stanford University and co-principal investigator of the Human Experience and Advancement Lab (HEAL), where his research focuses on artificial intelligence, data science, and the human dimensions of emergency care.

Dr. Rose is an emergency physician and clinical informaticist at Stanford University, where he studies how artificial intelligence is changing the way doctors think, document, and heal.

References

1. Hill RG, Sears LM, Melanson SW. 4000 clicks: a productivity analysis of electronic medical records in a community hospital ED. Am J Emerg Med. 2013;31(11):1591-1594.
2. Sinsky C, Colligan L, Li L, et al. Allocation of Physician Time in Ambulatory Practice: A Time and Motion Study in 4 Specialties. Ann Intern Med. 2016;165(11):753-760.