Cada vez más médicos ven con buenos ojos a los asistentes de IA. Pero aún hay tropiezos

When Jeannine Urban received a doctor’s check in November, she received her doctor’s full attention.

While consulting with a teacher on a computer, Urban’s primary care physician at Penn Internal Medicine’s practice in Media, Pa., used an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant known as ambient to take notes.

At the end of the 30-minute visit, the doctor presented Urban with the resume that generated the program: a clearly organized document for sections of his physician history, physical exams, and an evaluation and treatment plan for rheumatoid arthritis and patients, among other details.

The clinical note — which Urban could also review later on the patient portal — was incredibly detailed, he says. Summary of all your questions and concerns, along with the doctor’s answers. The assistant “makes sure we don’t pass anything,” Urban said.

Doctors view these ambient AI assistants as a revolutionary tool that allows them to focus on their patients instead of the keyboard.

Preliminary studies indicate that, to free doctors from the tedious and time-consuming task of documenting every patient encounter, these assistants could help reduce professional agotamiento and the call for “pajama time”: extra hours at home to work the day with work.

The potential for artificial intelligence to transform all aspects of the healthcare system – through direct attention to clinical effectiveness and medical innovation – is a topic of great interest, including in the Trump administration.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to remove barriers to unified state leadership on artificial intelligence. Later that same year, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a press release inviting certain sectors to provide their opinions on how to accelerate the adoption of AI in the health system.

In recent years, several emerging companies have launched ambient AI assistants that can integrate electronic health records (EHRs). Epic, the market-leading EHR vendor, is testing its own AI assistive technology, which plans a broader form than this year’s principles, according to Jackie Gerhart, family physician, chief medical officer and vice president of clinical informatics at Epic.

Technology experts estimate that one-third of providers give you access to this technology. As your adoption accelerates, we very much anticipate that it will become a recruitment tool, a basic requirement for new clinical professionals, which, indicating information, is more valuing the balance between professional and personal life.

“It’s part of keeping doctors happy,” said Robert Wachter, professor and head of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. On my next book, A giant stepexplore how AI is transforming health care. “Many health systems that initially had strict calculations on the return of reversal are now flexible in their posture and recognize that the cost of contracting and maintaining doctors is low.”

But I have a lot of concerns. ¿Improve medical attention and health outcomes when using ambient AI assistants? Do you want to use doctors as much time as they want to provide more attention or just to see more patients? How could you increase the cost of a consultation if the AI ​​assistant is connected to a cost-optimizing coding system?

Now this question remains unanswered.

The wizard’s paper

Urban says the presence of the AI ​​assistant hasn’t changed his experience as a patient much.

Normally, while you have verbal permission from the patient, the assistant takes the visit with a telephone and organizes the conversation in the format of a clinical note, omitting comments of no medical relevance, but including important information like a familiar’s recent cancer diagnosis, for example. The assistant’s note must be included in the supplier’s Historia Clínica Electrónica (HCE). Then the doctor reviews and confirms the document.

Even though patient encounters may not feel many different things, some professionals are making sure that ambient AI assistants change their patient encounters in unexpected ways.

“Now when there is a physical exam, I decided to say up top what I am doing and what I find in contact with the document assistant,” said Dina Capalongo, Urban’s primary care physician. “A la gente le parece muy interesante,” he added.

For example, when Capalongo is examining the carotid artery under a patient’s mandible, he may say out loud that he is not listening for a “soplo,” a vascular sound that can indicate atherosclerosis. The patients said: “Nunca supe por qué un medico escuchaba ahí”.

Decide yourself high because you are normally alone in the clinical note, you can represent a problem, especially during delicate physical examinations. Some doctors consider it important to adapt the conversation according to the context.

“There are patients who are anxious or assertive, and who tell you because they can’t worry, or who can worry during an inconvenient exam, who are unhelpful and, in truth, insensitive to what is alive,” said Genevieve Melton-Meaux, professor in the Division of Colon and Recto Medicine at the University of Minnesota, and director of informatics, health and artificial intelligence at Fairview Health Services, in Minneapolis. “Tengo eso muy presente y me aseguro de registrarlo after the consultation”.

“How we teach patients about these tools is very important, especially to maintain trust and ensure the information is accurate,” Melton-Meaux added.

More complete notes, but with disafíos

According to Kevin Johnson, a pediatrician and vice president of applied informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, studies have found that, in terms of integrity, clarity and timeliness, notes created by ambient AI assistants are generally as good as — even better than — traditional notes.

Without embargo, there is continued concern about AI “alucinación” calls, when the tool generates false information or an invention.

Kaiser Permanente, one of the first organizations to adopt this technology, has more than 25,000 physicians, advanced professionals and pharmacists across its system. According to Daniel Yang, intern and vice president of AI and emerging technologies at Kaiser, discoveries are “very rare.”

But it happens. For example, an AI-generated note might say that the medical plan is derived from a neurology patient or that they are performing a sequence for two weeks, when in reality this is never said.

“The technology is not perfect, and so doctors are reviewing it,” Yang said. The usual medical consultation learning system has been added. This is why it is essential that someone verifies the generated content.

And also, this “human writing” model has its limits, Wachter said. “Humans are not good at maintaining constant vigilance,” he said.

¿The mayor desigualdad tecnológica?

While the use of these assistants is more common, some people in the industry believe deep tech has a problem between those who have access and those who don’t.

Large health systems can advance with these technologies, according to Melton-Meaux. “What about pass with rural hospitals or small consultations? They need more recursos”.

The AI ​​assistants’ enthusiasm contrasts with the widespread frustration with electronic medical records when they were implemented a decade ago to replace paper histories.

“For the last 10 years when we adopted HCE, we all converted our writings to bulks and loads,” Wachter said.

With the assistance of AI assistants, doctors know that the technology is now working for them, not previous AI experts applied to healthcare.

Additionally, these assistants function as “training” for broader adoption of artificial intelligence in medical care, Wachter said.

To improve the value of the healthcare system and reduce costs, we explained that it is necessary to have a system that increases the likelihood that doctors will obtain an evidence-based medication, by ordering to the correct studios and receiving the correct medications.

“It’s already a few years away, but it will totally depend on AI,” he said.

Epic has developed more than 60 AI tools for patients, clinical professionals, and administration, and has more than 100 in development.

“It’s much more than an assistant,” Epic’s Gerhart said. “Literally, listen and act in a way that prepares me to do everything so that you can make decisions.”