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.

Physician moral injury is not burnout, it is accuracy

Shveta Gupta, MD, MBA

Health Technology

June 23, 2026

At 6:14 on a Monday morning, I open the electronic medical record (EMR) before I open the lights. The clinic does not open for two hours.

The ambient scribe ran on every encounter last week. Most notes are clean. Some need edits I will read between patients. The scribe captures the conversation. The clinical impression is still mine.

Beside the queue, the prior authorization dashboard shows eight denials from last week. Two …

Clinical AI liability lands on you, not the vendor

Erin J. Silvertooth, MD

Health Technology

June 22, 2026

Last month, I clicked “I agree” on a software update for a tool I use in my clinical practice. I do this all the time. So do you. Most of us treat these agreements like airline safety briefings: just background noise before we get to work.

I don’t do that anymore. Here’s why.

Every AI tool coming into psychiatric practice, like the ambient scribe, documentation assistant, or the clinical decision support feature …

How to use patient wearable data in cardiology visits

Tarpan Patel

Health Technology

June 21, 2026

A patient handed me his phone in clinic last week. He was 58, a runner, no known cardiovascular disease. “Doc, my WHOOP says my recovery has been in the red for two weeks. Should I be worried?”

Ten years ago, I would have politely deflected and ordered an echo if I felt the visit needed a deliverable. Today, I look at his screen. Because his wearable was telling me something his …

AI replacing doctors is not the point of AI in medicine

Michael Turken, MD, MPH

Health Technology

June 20, 2026

Robert Wachter has often discussed the productivity paradox: the frustrating delay between the introduction of a new technology and any actual gain in efficiency. In health care, we’ve lived this paradox through the electronic health record (EHR). We didn’t reinvent the medical record; we simply digitized the paper chart. We added billing artifacts, compliance language, and a deluge of alerts that serve the institution more than the patient.

Now, as generative …

How to recognize AI and health anxiety in medicine

Kamran Shukoor

Health Technology

June 20, 2026

The headache begins

The first time I worried I might have encephalitis, it wasn’t a textbook or professor that fueled my fear, it was the artificial intelligence (AI) on my phone.

It was late at night. I had a dull headache after studying, the kind I’d had dozens of times before. But this time felt different, because now I could interpret it. Earlier that week, we’d covered autoimmune encephalitis in a lecture. …

Patient access is where good care quietly breaks down

Juan Vera

Health Technology

June 19, 2026

After her shift, Rachel noticed the rash beneath her gloves had stopped burning, but it still worried her. She works night shifts as a cook and raises two children, so clinic hours fall when she’s sleeping, commuting, or managing family routines. During her overnight break, she searched on Google and found a clinic with strong reviews. The website did not offer online scheduling, so she had to call. She reached …

AI in medical education needs to read widely

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Health Technology

June 19, 2026

An excerpt from Practicing in the Age of AI: Essays on Medicine, Meaning, and Machines.

I recently bought a children’s book for my four-year-old granddaughter. Tucked beneath the copyright page was a sentence I had never seen before: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”

It wasn’t a medical text. It wasn’t a journal article …

AI in global health has continent-sized blind spots

Dr. Buga Charles George Kenyi

Health Technology

June 18, 2026

There is no doctor in my village.

I grew up in Logwerle, a small community in Central Equatoria State, South Sudan. When people got sick, they traveled far for care, or they didn’t get care at all. In 2003, my family moved to northern Uganda so I could get an education. I started primary school at Teremunga Primary School in Koboko, completed my O-levels at St. Charles Lwanga, and my A-levels …

AI in health care is a mirror, not a therapist

Matt Hasan, PhD

Health Technology

June 17, 2026

The most unsettling thing about artificial intelligence is not what it can do. It is what people feel when they talk to it.

I keep hearing the same things. “It listens.” “It doesn’t rush me.” “It helps me think.” “It seems to care.” Some people say this with embarrassment, as though confessing a weakness. Others say it with relief. A few say it with something close to gratitude.

These reactions have set …

Why the safest medical AI knows when not to answer

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Health Technology

June 17, 2026

When a recent study in Nature Medicine compared general-purpose AI models with specialized clinical tools, the headline was exactly the kind the technology world likes to see: The generalists came out on top.

The reactions were predictable. Some observers treated the study as proof that specialized clinical software is no longer needed, arguing that bigger and more powerful AI models will always win. Others dismissed the study, pointing out that AI …

When the AI diagnosis arrives before the patient does

Ganesh Asaithambi

Health Technology

June 16, 2026

I will never forget the look on his face. He wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t uncertain. He came into the hospital the way people used to come into courtrooms: with evidence already assembled, a verdict already reached, and very little interest in hearing otherwise. He had consulted an AI program before arriving, which had given him a diagnosis. He had read it, believed it, and arrived not as a patient seeking …

Generalist physicians and AI are a comparative advantage

Jeremy Fish, MD

Health Technology

June 15, 2026

Our culture mythologizes the lone genius (Edison, Einstein, Jobs), systematically erasing the collaborative ecosystems that made their contributions possible. This tendency has had profound consequences. It has contributed to a century-long devaluation of the generalist, the integrative thinker who ranges across domains, synthesizes disparate knowledge, and holds the whole in view while others tend the parts. This essay traces that arc and argues that artificial intelligence (AI) now presents an …

Patients are turning to AI because doctors lack time

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Health Technology

June 15, 2026

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

An emergency medicine physician writing in the New York Times recently described an interaction she had with an AI chatbot that might be a teaching lesson for our profession. After receiving her own lab results, she tried to discuss them with her physician. She was told a phone call would require …

The case for an AI-native health care platform

Brian Hudes, MD

Health Technology

June 14, 2026

From 1992 to 1995 I was a GI fellow. Nothing on the market made clinical sense for endoscopy reporting. The tools available were designed by people who had apparently never performed a procedure or written a note for one. I met a colleague in Australia, and together we built one of the first Windows-based endoscopy reporting systems in the country.

Microsoft Access. It worked.

It worked well until the United States moved …

You won the lawsuit. Search still says you lost.

Tim Brocklehurst, MBA

Health Technology

June 13, 2026

Kevin Pho has spent two decades making one argument to physicians: Your online reputation does not manage itself. Patients Google you before they call your office. What they find shapes their decision before you say a word. The solution, as he has consistently framed it, is to create content, to claim the top listings rather than leaving them to chance.

That advice is correct. It is also, in one specific and …

AI medical notes are losing the patient story

Paul Vance, DO

Health Technology

June 13, 2026

There was a time when a SOAP note meant something simple and important. It was a shared language among clinicians: Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan, designed to capture what actually happened in the exam room and to communicate it clearly to the next physician who would care for the patient. It was, at its best, a tool for continuity, safety, and professional accountability.

That time is slipping away.

Over the past two decades, …

AI in health care is quietly displacing physicians

Matt Hasan, PhD

Health Technology

June 12, 2026

Every physician knows the feeling. You trained for years to think independently, to assess, to judge. Now you spend more than half your workday staring at a screen, entering data into fields someone else designed, responding to alerts someone else configured. The patient is in front of you. The system is between you.

That experience is not just a workflow frustration. It is a signal of something far more consequential that …

Actual Intelligence: the skill AI cannot replace

Alan P. Feren, MD

Health Technology

June 12, 2026

Artificial intelligence is no longer arriving in medicine. It has arrived. The American Medical Association’s 2026 Physician Survey found that 81 percent of physicians now use AI in their practices, more than double the 38 percent who reported using it in 2023. In three years it went from a minority tool to a default one, concentrated most heavily in documentation and summarization, the workflows closest to how we think.

The same …

AI bias in health care reads the writer, not the symptom

Craig Hauben, MPA

Health Technology

June 11, 2026

A few weeks ago I wrote here about the eGFR race correction, the flawed formula that overestimated kidney function in Black patients for twenty years while clinicians trusted the number on the screen. The piece ended with a warning that the same failure is being rebuilt with AI, minus the part where anyone can inspect the formula. Readers sent back the natural question. If the next eGFR is already …

Clinical documentation workflow is not just an AI fix

Sterling Garde

Health Technology

June 10, 2026

There’s a certain kind of work in health care that never quite fits anywhere. It’s not the structured clinical note. It’s not the templated visit. It’s everything else. The documentation that still matters, but doesn’t fit the system built to hold it.

Most documentation systems in health care are built around a simple assumption: that clinical work is structured, discrete, and tied to a defined patient encounter. That works well in …

Health Technology

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts

Subscribe to KevinMD and never miss a story!

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts