# AI Scribes: Are We Measuring What Matters?

## TL;DR

AI scribes are being widely adopted in healthcare to help clinicians create clinical documents, but their safety and effectiveness remain unproven.

## Contribution

The paper highlights the urgent need to evaluate the safety and clinical outcomes of AI scribes compared to traditional note-taking methods.

## Key findings

- AI scribes reduce documentation time and clinician burden.
- The quality of clinical notes produced by AI scribes is often reasonable.
- There is a lack of evidence on the safety and clinical outcomes of AI scribes.

## Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) scribes, software that can convert speech into concise clinical documents, have achieved remarkable clinical adoption at a pace rarely seen for digital technologies in health care. The reasons for this are understandable: the technology works well enough, it addresses a genuine pain point for clinicians, and it has largely sidestepped regulatory requirements. In many ways, clinical adoption of AI scribes has also occurred well ahead of robust evidence of their safety and efficacy. The papers in this theme issue demonstrate real progress in the technology and evidence of its benefit: documentation times are reported to decrease when using scribes, clinicians report feeling less burdened, and the notes produced are often of reasonable quality. Yet as we survey the emerging evidence base, there remains one outstanding and urgent unanswered question: Are AI scribes safe? We need to know the clinical outcomes achievable when scribes are used compared to other forms of note taking.