AI Scribes: Are We Measuring What Matters?

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.