Health technology

1,606 articles · Since 2004

Articles, page 6

Is chatbot sycophancy dangerous for psychotic patients?

September 1, 2026Sep 1, 2026

When a chatbot agrees with something false, it rarely has to lie to do it. That's the finding from a new MIT-affiliated study modeling how sycophancy compounds over a conversation. Researchers built a Bayesian simulation running 10,000 conversations across 11…

When a chatbot agrees with something false, it rarely has to lie to do it.

That’s the finding from a new MIT-affiliated study modeling how sycophancy compounds over a conversation. Researchers built a Bayesian simulation running 10,000 conversations across 11 levels of chatbot agreeableness. At the highest sycophancy setting, roughly half of simulated users ended the conversation at 99 percent confidence in a belief that was demonstrably false. When …

Why AI governance in health care cannot be backdated

Neel Chauhan, MD, MBA

August 31, 2026Aug 31, 2026

On July 29, Hackensack Meridian Health became the first health system in the country to earn The Joint Commission's Responsible Use of AI in Health Care certification. Most coverage treated it as a milestone for one New Jersey network. I…

On July 29, Hackensack Meridian Health became the first health system in the country to earn The Joint Commission’s Responsible Use of AI in Health Care certification. Most coverage treated it as a milestone for one New Jersey network. I read it as a deadline for everyone else, because of a single question that certification normalizes, and that most organizations cannot yet answer.

The question is: “Show me this model.”

Not your …

Why ambient AI scribe notes fail the 2026 CMS audit

Kaif Ruman

August 31, 2026Aug 31, 2026

The 2026 clinical landscape is witnessing a profound documentation paradox. While ambient AI scribes are celebrated for reducing "pajama time," new data suggests they may be creating a systemic Attestation Gap. Research published in JAMA Network Open found that burnout…

The 2026 clinical landscape is witnessing a profound documentation paradox. While ambient AI scribes are celebrated for reducing “pajama time,” new data suggests they may be creating a systemic Attestation Gap. Research published in JAMA Network Open found that burnout prevalence dropped from 51.9 percent to 38.8 percent after the adoption of ambient tools, but the study did not measure documentation quality as an outcome. This raises the …

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The buyer is not the user in electronic health records

Matthias Muenzer, MD

August 30, 2026Aug 30, 2026

I have practiced medicine for more than three decades, thirty years of obstetrics and gynecology, and now addiction medicine. For seventeen of those years, I have worked inside electronic medical records that waste my time, interrupt my thinking, and stand…

Like a lot of clinicians, I kept notebooks, running lists of what a truly helpful record would do, scribbled after long evenings …

Frontier AI oversight must match real-world risk

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

August 29, 2026Aug 29, 2026

Should frontier AI be allowed to grade its own homework? In a recent Science editorial, Thorsten Holz makes an important point: Claims about the capabilities and safety of frontier AI should not rest solely on assurances from the laboratories developing…

Should frontier AI be allowed to grade its own homework?

In a recent Science editorial, Thorsten Holz makes an important point: Claims about the capabilities and safety of frontier AI should not rest solely on assurances from the laboratories developing these systems. Some degree of independent verification is reasonable. The more difficult question is how much oversight is justified by the evidence. Comparisons are increasingly being made between frontier AI …

4 questions to ask before you trust clinical AI tools

Neil Panchal, DO

August 29, 2026Aug 29, 2026

A colleague showed me a tool she was thinking about bringing into her practice. She pasted in a patient summary and got back a tidy set of next steps. Ten minutes later, to show me how it worked, she pasted the same summary in again. The answer came back different. The gap was small, but if the two of us had been covering for each other that week, we would …

AI chatbot practicing medicine with a fabricated license

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

August 29, 2026Aug 29, 2026

In May, an investigator with Pennsylvania's own Department of State opened the Character.AI app and searched the word "psychiatry." One of the results was a chatbot named Emilie, described on the platform as "Doctor of psychiatry. You are her patient."…

In May, an investigator with Pennsylvania’s own Department of State opened the Character.AI app and searched the word “psychiatry.” One of the results was a chatbot named Emilie, described on the platform as “Doctor of psychiatry. You are her patient.” The investigator told Emilie he’d been feeling sad, empty, tired all the time, unmotivated. Emilie suggested he might be depressed and offered to complete an assessment. When asked about her …

How a doctor with no coding background built his own bedside AI tools [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

August 27, 2026Aug 27, 2026

At 2 a.m., a surgeon needed an answer fast and had no one to ask. So he built the tool himself, with no coding background. In this episode, consultant cardiac anesthesiologist Ahmed Elsonbaty explains how a single bleeding-patient case in…

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AI gave patients answers. They still need judgment.

Paul Dranichnikov, MD, PhD

August 26, 2026Aug 26, 2026

The modern physician is no longer competing with disease alone. The new adversary is expectation: limitless, instantaneous, and increasingly shaped by algorithms. In the span of a decade, the patient has evolved. First came "Dr. Google, MD" offering a chaotic…

The modern physician is no longer competing with disease alone. The new adversary is expectation: limitless, instantaneous, and increasingly shaped by algorithms.

In the span of a decade, the patient has evolved. First came “Dr. Google, MD” offering a chaotic but empowering flood of information. Then “Dr. PubMed, MD, PhD” sharpening the curious into quasi-specialists fluent in abstracts and endpoints. Now we face the almighty “Prof. AI”: tireless, confident, and available …

How to ask patients about AI chatbots and psychosis

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

August 25, 2026Aug 25, 2026

In November 2023, before ChatGPT-driven psychosis cases had made a single headline, a Danish psychiatrist named Søren Dinesen Østergaard published a short, almost speculative paper in Schizophrenia Bulletin. His question: Would generative AI chatbots generate delusions in individuals prone to psychosis? At the time, it read like an interesting hypothesis from someone paying close attention to a technology most of psychiatry hadn’t thought much about yet.

This February, Østergaard and …

Chatbot safety for psychosis is failing patients in 2026

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

August 19, 2026Aug 19, 2026

Sophie Rottenberg's mother described her, before this year, as "a largely problem-free twenty-nine-year-old badass extrovert who fiercely embraced life." No documented psychiatric history. No prior crisis. Just, in her mother's words, "a mix of mood and hormone symptoms" that led…

Sophie Rottenberg’s mother described her, before this year, as “a largely problem-free twenty-nine-year-old badass extrovert who fiercely embraced life.” No documented psychiatric history. No prior crisis. Just, in her mother’s words, “a mix of mood and hormone symptoms” that led her to confide in a ChatGPT persona named Harry instead of her own therapist, her best friend, or her parents. She died by suicide this winter. Sixteen-year-old Adam Raine had …

AI and critical thinking: the cost of borrowed mastery

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

August 19, 2026Aug 19, 2026

We are currently navigating a fundamental shift in how we engage with the world, one that is accelerating the rise of modern individualism and a particular brand of digital narcissism. There is a growing erosion of the boundary between authentic intelligence, which is the slow, messy, and deeply felt process of understanding, and the appearance of intelligence, which is now just a click away through data synthesis.

We have entered an …

AI scribes save 16 minutes, not your evenings

Junaid Niazi, MD, MPH

August 18, 2026Aug 18, 2026

During my first few months as a newly minted primary care physician, I spent many weeknight evenings negotiating with myself. The negotiation was always the same. If I close three more notes, I've done enough to go home for dinner.…

I knew, while making the deal, that “enough” was a fiction, because after dinner I’d open the laptop again and work until the work was done, …

AI tools in health care are cleared, not proven to work

Harsha Moole, MD

August 17, 2026Aug 17, 2026

One morning, a new alert showed up in our charts. Just a colored banner. Nobody told us what data it learned from, who it had been tested on, or what we were supposed to do when it went off at…

One morning, a new alert showed up in our charts. Just a colored banner. Nobody told us what data it learned from, who it had been tested on, or what we were supposed to do when it went off at 3 a.m. on a patient who looked fine. We were expected to act on it anyway.

We were trained to pick apart a study and question a drug rep. Then software …

How doctors lost it: first the money, then the authority, now the thinking

Michael Duben, MD

August 15, 2026Aug 15, 2026

The so-called deskilling of physicians is a red-hot subject in discussions of AI in health care. I hate the term "deskilling" just about as much as I hate the term "provider." It is shallow and smacks of the MBA PowerPoint…

The so-called deskilling of physicians is a red-hot subject in discussions of AI in health care. I hate the term “deskilling” just about as much as I hate the term “provider.” It is shallow and smacks of the MBA PowerPoint presentation. What is being lost is not some random skill. It is the physician’s core competence: the ability to synthesize a history of present illness and formulate a diagnostic and …

AI-assisted writing can extend a writer’s creative life

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

August 14, 2026Aug 14, 2026

The debate over artificial intelligence (AI) and writing seems destined to have no definitive conclusion. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has pleaded with readers not to write with AI, arguing that writing is inseparable from thinking and that outsourcing…

The debate over artificial intelligence (AI) and writing seems destined to have no definitive conclusion.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has pleaded with readers not to write with AI, arguing that writing is inseparable from thinking and that outsourcing the former eventually weakens the latter. Others make a more accommodating case: Use AI as a copy editor, researcher, critic, or sparring partner, but do not let it replace the …

Why AI governance in health care falls on clinicians in 2026

Matt Hasan, PhD

August 14, 2026Aug 14, 2026

Another state just added itself to the list of places with its own AI health care law. Another compliance memo just landed on somebody's desk. It's easy to file this under bureaucratic noise, something legal will sort out. It isn't.…

Another state just added itself to the list of places with its own AI health care law. Another compliance memo just landed on somebody’s desk. It’s easy to file this under bureaucratic noise, something legal will sort out. It isn’t. A physician documents why she overrode an ambient scribe’s note. A nurse practitioner checks a disclosure banner before a generative AI-drafted message goes out to a patient. A physician assistant …

Before you paste your labs into ChatGPT, read this

Simon Mathews, MD

August 10, 2026Aug 10, 2026

A third of American adults asked an AI chatbot a health question in the past year, according to KFF polling from March. Among those users, 41 percent uploaded personal medical information to do it. If that’s you, I’d like to share a few pitfalls and pointers. I’m a practicing gastroenterologist who also works in health tech.

Let’s start with the pitfalls. There are two that most people haven’t been …

The $17 billion case for provider data accuracy

Megan Schmidt

August 9, 2026Aug 9, 2026

Health care is spending billions to modernize the future while ignoring one of its most expensive operational failures. Provider data, the foundational information that determines who gets paid, where patients receive care, and how networks function, remains inaccurate across much…

Health care is spending billions to modernize the future while ignoring one of its most expensive operational failures.

Provider data, the foundational information that determines who gets paid, where patients receive care, and how networks function, remains inaccurate across much of the industry. The consequences are staggering: billions in administrative waste, provider frustration, payment delays, network disruption, compliance exposure, and poor member experiences. With more than $17 billion lost annually …

Clinical judgment is what turns information into medicine

Dr. Souad Remani

August 5, 2026Aug 5, 2026

Medicine has always evolved Every generation of physicians has witnessed change. New instruments replaced older ones. New imaging techniques revealed what could once only be imagined. Laboratory medicine became increasingly accurate. Minimally invasive procedures reduced recovery times. Digital records replaced…

Medicine has always evolved

Every generation of physicians has witnessed change. New instruments replaced older ones. New imaging techniques revealed what could once only be imagined. Laboratory medicine became increasingly accurate. Minimally invasive procedures reduced recovery times. Digital records replaced paper files. Today, artificial intelligence is beginning to assist physicians in ways that seemed impossible only a few years ago.

For many people, these changes suggest a simple conclusion: Technology will eventually …

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