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.

A South Sudan doctor on the AI health equity gap

Health Technology
July 27, 2026

My LinkedIn feed has been flooded with discussion about a recent Nature Medicine study showing that general-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks. Clinical informatics leaders are calling it a wake-up call for health care, pointing to a timeless truth: Technology rarely fails at the technical layer. It fails because we don’t map how the work actually happens on the ground.

As a clinician working in …

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A South Sudan doctor on the AI health equity gap

AI versus clinicians is the wrong health care question

Health Technology
July 26, 2026

Recent product announcements from major wearable companies showcased the polarization of views on the direction of well tech. During the past two weeks, Google has made significant moves to deepen its health AI ambitions, and Whoop has doubled down on positioning its device as a clinical-grade monitoring tool. Both companies represent serious, well-resourced bets on the future of consumer health. And watching these developments closely, I’ve found myself thinking about …

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AI versus clinicians is the wrong health care question

Clinical AI tools are losing to general-purpose models

Health Technology
July 26, 2026

Open almost any surgical journal this year and you’ll find a new AI model. A neural network that predicts anastomotic leak. A risk calculator trained on a single institution’s registry. A computer-vision system that labels the phases of a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. A bespoke tool for predicting graft patency, rupture risk, or readmission. Each is presented as a small, hard-won victory where domain experts encode clinical knowledge into a tightly scoped …

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Clinical AI tools are losing to general-purpose models

AI will not replace physician advisors. Volume will.

Health Technology
July 26, 2026

I just came off the stage at NPAC 2026 in Charlotte, where I presented to a room full of physician advisors on practical AI strategies for expanding bandwidth. The questions afterward told me everything I needed to know about where this profession stands right now.

Nobody asked whether AI was coming. They already know it is. They asked something more honest than that: How do we use it without losing the …

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AI will not replace physician advisors. Volume will.

How clinical alerts deliver a fuller view of patients

Health Technology
July 25, 2026

For more than two decades, admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) alerts have served as the backbone of automated patient-activity notification in U.S. health care. Designed to give clinicians and care managers a real-time heads-up when patients interact with and move through the health care system, they remain a workhorse of care coordination, and inside the facilities a care team is directly connected to, they often perform exactly as intended.

However, …

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How clinical alerts deliver a fuller view of patients

How AI in health care administration eases burnout

Health Technology
July 25, 2026

When we think of health care innovation, our minds typically gravitate toward clinical breakthroughs: state-of-the-art robotic surgeries, cutting-edge wearables, or novel pharmaceutical treatments. However, one of the most profound transformations in the modern health care sector is happening behind the scenes.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated technologies into health care administration is quietly revolutionizing how facilities operate. By alleviating the massive administrative burden placed on medical professionals, these …

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How AI in health care administration eases burnout

Doctors who ignore AI will get left behind [PODCAST]

Podcast
July 23, 2026
YouTube video

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When your hospital decides how to use AI, will you be in the room or will you be handed whatever someone else picked? Physicians have done this before, letting insurance and then EMRs …

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Doctors who ignore AI will get left behind [PODCAST]

The real barrier to evidence-based medicine is access

Health Technology
July 21, 2026

Recently, I learned that access to a clinical artificial intelligence platform had been restricted within my training environment. My first reaction was not anger. It was curiosity.

The decision may have been entirely reasonable. Health care institutions have legitimate concerns about privacy, security, liability, accuracy, and governance. Those concerns deserve thoughtful consideration. But the experience left me wondering about something much bigger than any individual hospital or software platform. If physicians …

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The real barrier to evidence-based medicine is access

AI should elevate clinical judgment, not replace it

Health Technology
July 21, 2026

Artificial intelligence is forcing medicine to make a choice that has received surprisingly little attention. Should AI be designed to replace increasing portions of clinical judgment? Or should it be designed to elevate it? Much of today’s discussion assumes these are the same objective. They are not. One seeks to substitute human reasoning. The other seeks to strengthen it.

Unfortunately, the momentum today is largely toward replacement. We read almost daily …

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AI should elevate clinical judgment, not replace it

What generative AI in health care makes newly possible

Health Technology
July 20, 2026

When I served as chair of the Board of Registration for Physician Assistants in Massachusetts, every decision carried a weight that extended far beyond the immediate case in front of us. Whether we were reviewing a licensing violation, addressing unprofessional conduct, or weighing in on a practice standard, we were always, whether we named it or not, making decisions about what kind of profession we wanted PA practice to be …

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What generative AI in health care makes newly possible

Can AI at the bedside finally ease clinician burnout?

Health Technology
July 19, 2026

A recent paradigm shift in software engineering, where developers build complex applications using pure natural language, intuition, and high-level architectural oversight rather than writing manual syntax, unlocked a radical new relationship between humans and machines. It is time for clinical medicine to experience its equivalent. We propose a clinical care model in which a physician directs a multimodal AI assistant in real time at the patient’s bedside through speech, vision, …

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Can AI at the bedside finally ease clinician burnout?

The real reason physicians won’t delegate paperwork

Health Technology
July 18, 2026

Ask physicians why they don’t hand off more of the paperwork burying their day, and the answer comes fast. No time to train anyone. Not enough staff. The EHR fights it. All fair. Those are the reasons that surface when a practice sits down and asks why everyone’s stretched so thin.

There’s another reason on that list, though. Lower down. The one nobody says with the door open.

When the AMA Read more…

The real reason physicians won’t delegate paperwork

Clinical authorship: the missing principle in medical AI

Health Technology
July 17, 2026

Artificial intelligence has not entered the clinical encounter at one point. It has entered at three discrete points, and they’re rarely discussed as one problem.

Before the visit, patients are using AI to organize symptoms, interpret test results, and decide whether a concern is worth seeing someone about. During the visit, clinicians are using AI to search evidence, broaden a differential, and check guidelines. After the visit, ambient tools are turning …

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Clinical authorship: the missing principle in medical AI

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The EHR interoperability gap that costs lives

Health Technology
July 16, 2026

My grandfather might still be here were it not for how electronic health records exist in a silo.

As an incoming stroke alert, the ambulance would soon bring him to a hospital system he had never been to. Unaware that he was on a blood thinner, their well-meaning thrombolysis converted his thrombotic stroke to a devastating hemorrhagic death sentence. But how could something like this even happen?

The electronic health record (EHR) …

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The EHR interoperability gap that costs lives

Remote therapeutic monitoring for the gaps between visits

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 …

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Remote therapeutic monitoring for the gaps between visits

Why independent practices sell comes down to billing

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 …

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Why independent practices sell comes down to billing

Why most AI mental health apps feel like a loop

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 …

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Why most AI mental health apps feel like a loop

What should AI do when the blood bank is empty?

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 …

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What should AI do when the blood bank is empty?

What software engineering just taught medicine about AI

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 …

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What software engineering just taught medicine about AI

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

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 …

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

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