Health Technology

Physicians writing on KevinMD about the technology in the exam room: the electronic record and what it did to the visit, meaningful use, alert fatigue, pajama time, human and AI scribes and whether they give time back, ambient documentation, telemedicine, and what AI can do in clinical practice now and who is responsible when it is wrong. Two maintained records draw on this archive: The electronic health record: what physicians say, in their own words and Artificial intelligence: what physicians say, in their own words.

Remote therapeutic monitoring for the gaps between visits

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Health Technology

July 16, 2026

Over my more than 20 years as a pain management physician, I have seen countless patients struggle with chronic pain. Many describe the same frustrations: breakthrough pain that disrupts their days, the challenge of sticking to home exercises or medications, and the anxiety of wondering whether their symptoms are worsening between office visits. Traditional care, with its reliance on scheduled appointments, often leaves gaps that can lead to flare-ups, unnecessary …

Why independent practices sell comes down to billing

Zack Spooner

Health Technology

July 16, 2026

I’m an engineer, not a physician. For the better part of a year I worked on AI for primary care, and much of that time I spent close to primary care doctors and the people who keep their practices open. I went in assuming the hardest problems would be clinical. They weren’t. The thing I watched wear people down, week after week, was billing.

Not the medicine. The paperwork wrapped around …

Why most AI mental health apps feel like a loop

Ronke Lawal, MBA

Health Technology

July 15, 2026

Owning a proprietary infrastructure layer in AI right now is closer to owning a diamond mine than owning a piece of software, yet most mental health apps still choose to live inside the wrapper pool rather than build their own. That observation comes from years spent building at the intersection of artificial intelligence, behavioral psychology, and neuroscience, evaluating every frontier AI model available, both general-purpose and mental-health-specific, until I could …

What should AI do when the blood bank is empty?

Dr. Buga Charles George Kenyi

Health Technology

July 15, 2026

As physicians, we are taught to diagnose accurately and act quickly. Clinical guidelines assume that if we identify the problem, the health care system will provide the necessary tools to solve it. But what happens when the diagnosis is clear and the treatment simply does not exist?

Recently, while working as an intern physician in South Sudan, I cared for a 9-year-old boy who had traveled from the outskirts of Juba …

What software engineering just taught medicine about AI

Craig Hauben, MPA

Health Technology

July 14, 2026

The most useful AI data for physicians published this year had nothing to do with medicine.

In early June, Anthropic released a report called “When AI builds itself.” One number matters more than the rest. As of May, more than 80 percent of the code merged into the company’s own codebase was written by the very same AI. A typical Anthropic engineer now produces 5.8 times as much code per …

5 hot takes on AI in health care from a physician CMO

Robert Murry, MD

Health Technology

July 14, 2026

Everyone is talking about AI in health care, but I bring a somewhat unusual perspective to the discussion. In addition to serving as chief medical officer for NextGen Healthcare, I am a practicing family physician in a practice owned by a local hospital. I also own and operate a small practice with my wife, which gives me firsthand experience with the realities of independent medicine. On top of that, I …

Why AI clinical notes will never hold a trembling hand

Ope' Komolafe, MD

Health Technology

July 14, 2026

It was one of the slower nights in December. The ICU PA and I were making small talk, and he handed me an AI-generated Christmas carol composed for ventilated ICU patients. Skimming through, I found the lines mischievously fascinating, if a little macabre. My musings were quickly interrupted by an inner prompt to complete my notes.

The prompt did not indicate a preference for note writing over Christmas cheer, but rather …

Why medicine is late to asynchronous telehealth

Tod Stillson, MD

Health Technology

July 13, 2026

A patient called my office at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday. She had a UTI. She knew she had a UTI. She’d treated the same thing twice before that year and could probably have diagnosed it faster than a med student. What she needed was a one-minute conversation and a prescription. What she got was my voicemail, a suggestion to call back in the morning, and an appointment slot 17 …

Why AI scribes keep senior physicians in practice

Kevin

Health Technology

July 11, 2026

For years now, the burnout conversation in health care has been almost exclusively fixated on mid-career physicians, who are staring down decades of EHR documentation and quietly refreshing their LinkedIn profiles. These exhausted doctors in their prime are considering early exits, career pivots, and anything to get out from under the weight of it all. However, there’s another story playing out, quieter and in some ways more striking, among physicians …

AI in eldercare is a workforce story, not a tech one

Matt Hasan, PhD

Health Technology

July 10, 2026

Artificial intelligence is arriving in eldercare for a reason that receives far less attention than the technology itself. It is not entering because the technology has suddenly matured or because health care has embraced a new digital vision. It is entering because the workforce responsible for caring for older adults is approaching its practical limits.

The United States is entering a demographic transition unlike any it has experienced before. Millions of …

AI and critical thinking: Use it or lose it

Hussain Isma'eel, MD, MHCA

Health Technology

July 10, 2026

Technologies differ not merely in their complexity, but in the breadth of what they enable humans to do. As their capabilities expand, so too does their influence on how we perceive and interact with the world. A stick is a simple technology with relatively few uses. Compare it to the saddle, which allowed humans to harness the power of the horse, communicate with it, direct it, and ultimately reshape transportation …

What telemedicine gets right that in-person care gets wrong

Viktor Simunović, MD

Health Technology

July 8, 2026

A patient called at 7:45 on a Tuesday morning. She was a nurse, working nights. She had confirmed flu, her employer needed documentation within 24 hours, and the nearest GP clinic had a three-week wait for a routine appointment. Getting seen that day would have meant taking a taxi to an urgent care waiting room, feverish, and sitting next to people who didn’t need to be exposed to influenza.

She got …

Your ambient AI scribe consent checkbox is not consent

Erin J. Silvertooth, MD

Health Technology

July 5, 2026

Every ambient AI scribe demo ends the same way. The visit wraps, the note is already written, and you get an evening back.

None show the part at the beginning where you must tell the patient a machine is listening, explain what that means, answer questions, and get their agreement before the visit can begin.

That disclosure is not a ten-second formality. It is a conversation, and in psychiatry, it can derail …

What happens when medical AI talks to medical AI

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Health Technology

June 30, 2026

An excerpt from Medicine at the Crossroads: Commentaries from a Profession Caught Between Patients, Politics, Technology, and Trust.

In 1979, Kramer vs. Kramer gave us a custody battle in which two wounded adults fought over the future of a child they both loved but understood differently. It was intimate, painful, and unmistakably human. The medical sequel being written today is less likely to unfold in a courtroom than in an …

What an EHR migration actually costs in year one

GetPracticeHelp

Health Technology

June 29, 2026

Most physician owners consider switching EHR systems when frustration peaks. Support hold times have crossed an hour. Productivity has dropped enough that two providers are working late three nights a week. The system has felt wrong for at least eighteen months. The decision then forms around the frustration. A new vendor is researched, a demo is scheduled, and a migration is planned for the slow season. What rarely happens is …

Can AI defeat death? Physicians need evidence first

Hussain Isma'eel, MD, MHCA

Health Technology

June 28, 2026

While the field of artificial intelligence has existed for decades, the release of OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) to consumers provided the propelling boost for AI’s widespread adoption. This transformation is evident across nearly every aspect of health care. It can be seen in the surging number of research publications on AI in medicine and is perhaps felt even more in clinical practice, where patients, physicians, and health care providers …

The hidden variable in the physician burnout debate

Oren Fass, MD

Health Technology

June 28, 2026

I suppose I have the same split personality most doctors have toward their careers. There are days I love it. I’m a cataract surgeon, I give people back their vision, and it’s almost like having a Marvel superpower. I don’t shoot LASIK lasers out of my eyes or sprout scalpels from between my knuckles, but give me an operating microscope and good things will happen to your vision. And then …

AI tools for physicians: What to use, what to ignore

Neil Panchal, DO

Health Technology

June 28, 2026

Every week, another article lands in my inbox telling me AI will change medicine. What none of them include is a straight answer to the question every physician is actually asking: Which tools should I use Monday morning, and which ones can I safely ignore?

After years in emergency medicine and now building clinical infrastructure for preventive care, I’ve watched this space closely enough to separate what’s working from what’s being …

Is AI replacing radiologists? A radiologist disagrees.

Pouyan Golshani, MD

Health Technology

June 27, 2026

A third-year medical student told me last month she was not going to apply to radiology. She had been interested all through second year, had done a sub-internship she liked, and had the grades to match anywhere. Then she changed her mind. The reason, almost verbatim: “My advisor said I should not go into a field that AI is going to replace.”

She is not the only one. I have heard …

AI and clinical judgment belong together, not at war

Marguerite Frank, MOTR/L

Health Technology

June 24, 2026

For five years, I’ve navigated a complex medical journey. At age 38, at the peak of my health, I developed shortness of breath. I wrote it off as adult-onset asthma, fatigue, or “just getting older.” When I put a pulse ox on one morning and saw my numbers drop to 88 percent, I knew something was wrong. It was an arduous process, but I ended up with a diagnosis of …

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