Physicians writing on KevinMD about the electronic record and artificial intelligence: what the record did to the visit and who it was built for, alert fatigue and pajama time, human and AI scribes and the minutes they actually save, ambient documentation and its audit risk, and what AI can do in clinical practice now, whether it will replace physicians, 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.

AI in scientific writing: Assistance is not authorship

Health Technology
September 4, 2026

Most scientists I know have several unfinished manuscripts at any given time. I am no exception. Some of mine concern recent work; others are based on research completed years ago, and, in a few cases, decades ago.

I vividly remember a senior colleague at the National Institute of Nutrition who served as my supervisor for a couple of years. He would often show me, with great enthusiasm, a stack of over …

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AI in scientific writing: Assistance is not authorship

7 rules for how physicians should use AI responsibly

Health Technology
September 4, 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering medicine faster than many physicians expected. It is already helping draft notes, summarize records, answer patient questions, support imaging workflows, and organize clinical data. Some tools are useful. Some are premature. Many are somewhere in between.

The question for physicians is no longer whether AI will appear in clinical care. It already has. The real question is how to use it without giving away the judgment …

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7 rules for how physicians should use AI responsibly

Augmented intelligence is the model education needs

Health Technology
September 3, 2026

Harvard’s decision to dismantle its Writing Center as an independent entity and to lay off its longtime director, Jane Rosenzweig, has sparked an unusual level of anger. Students, faculty, former tutors, and alums have protested a decision that might otherwise have slipped into the fog of administrative restructuring.

The controversy is about more than a single employee or even a single writing center. It raises a much larger question: What …

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Augmented intelligence is the model education needs

Clinical AI should replace workflows, not physicians

Health Technology
September 2, 2026

Every few months, the news runs with a headline about artificial intelligence replacing doctors. A model passes an exam. A chatbot answers a patient question. A system summarizes a chart or reads an image. The debate starts again.

Will AI replace physicians? I think that is the wrong question. The better question is: Which parts of modern medical work should never have been placed on physicians in the first place?

Doctors are …

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Clinical AI should replace workflows, not physicians

Why the AI therapy law will not protect your patients

Health Technology
September 2, 2026

California’s SB 903 cleared the legislature on August 31, with the Assembly concurring in Senate amendments by a vote of 40 to 0. It now sits on Governor Newsom’s desk. Assuming he signs it, it’s a real, needed law: It bars companies from advertising AI products as “therapy,” and it puts disclosure, consent, and human-oversight requirements around AI used inside licensed clinical care.

When I wrote about this bill back …

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Why the AI therapy law will not protect your patients

Can AI in risk adjustment be trusted to code accurately?

Health Technology
September 2, 2026

Health care’s relationship with artificial intelligence (AI) often swings between two extremes: enthusiasm and anxiety. On one hand, AI is helping clinicians reduce administrative work, uncover relevant information buried in medical records, and identify opportunities to improve patient care. On the other, regulators are becoming increasingly concerned about how AI is used in high-stakes decisions that affect payment, compliance, and patient outcomes.

In February 2026, the Office of Inspector General …

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Can AI in risk adjustment be trusted to code accurately?

AI in hospital medicine can give hospitalists time back

Health Technology
September 2, 2026

It has been 30 years since the term “hospitalist” was introduced, and while the specialty has grown into one of the fastest-growing medical specialties in the United States, it now faces a defining inflection point. Excessive bureaucratic tasks, financial pressures, escalating documentation demands, and the growing burden of electronic health records (EHRs) are often cited as primary drivers of burnout, affecting over one-third of hospitalists. As an example, hospitalists spend …

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AI in hospital medicine can give hospitalists time back

Is chatbot sycophancy dangerous for psychotic patients?

Health Technology
September 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 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 the …

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Is chatbot sycophancy dangerous for psychotic patients?

Why AI governance in health care cannot be backdated

Health Technology
August 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 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 …

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Why AI governance in health care cannot be backdated

Why ambient AI scribe notes fail the 2026 CMS audit

Health Technology
August 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 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 question …

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Why ambient AI scribe notes fail the 2026 CMS audit

The buyer is not the user in electronic health records

Health Technology
August 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 between me and the person in front of me.

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

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The buyer is not the user in electronic health records

Medical infographics now look right without being right

Medical Education
August 30, 2026

I recently found myself doing something almost every medical student has done before a presentation: searching online for a diagram that could explain a complex concept more clearly than words alone.

What surprised me was not the number of infographics available. It was how difficult it had become to determine who created them, where the information came from, or whether the content had been reviewed by anyone with medical expertise.

In the …

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Medical infographics now look right without being right

Frontier AI oversight must match real-world risk

Health Technology
August 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 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 …

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Frontier AI oversight must match real-world risk

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4 questions to ask before you trust clinical AI tools

Health Technology
August 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 …

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4 questions to ask before you trust clinical AI tools

AI chatbot practicing medicine with a fabricated license

Health Technology
August 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.” 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 …

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AI chatbot practicing medicine with a fabricated license

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

Health Technology
August 27, 2026
YouTube video

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

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 …

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

Why telemedicine should be a career, not a side gig [PODCAST]

Podcast
August 26, 2026
YouTube video

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

When his shifts were cut during the pandemic, he took a telemedicine job to pay the bills and ended up loving it. Suneer Chander is an emergency physician who co-wrote the article “Read more…

Why telemedicine should be a career, not a side gig [PODCAST]

AI gave patients answers. They still need judgment.

Health Technology
August 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 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 …

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AI gave patients answers. They still need judgment.

How to ask patients about AI chatbots and psychosis

Health Technology
August 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 …

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How to ask patients about AI chatbots and psychosis

Chatbot safety for psychosis is failing patients in 2026

Health Technology
August 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 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 …

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Chatbot safety for psychosis is failing patients in 2026

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