Doctors turn to AI assistants to reduce burnout and bring joy back to medicine
Doctors turn to AI assistants to reduce burnout and bring joy back to medicine
Publish Date: 2026-02-20 06:32:00
Source Domain: www.wkyc.com
AI is revolutionizing healthcare by assisting doctors with note-taking and patient monitoring, leading to reduced physician burnout.
BRECKSVILLE, Ohio — Artificial intelligence is transforming doctor visits in ways patients might not notice. From documenting appointments to detecting life-threatening infections, AI has become physicians’ newest assistant—raising questions about safety, accuracy, and what happens when patients use it to diagnose themselves.
Dr. Eric Boose, a family physician and associate chief medical information officer at Cleveland Clinic, has used AI scribe technology for almost two years. The app listens to conversations between doctor and patient, filters out casual chit-chat, and transforms the discussion into a complete medical note.
“It just really relaxes you in the exam room, not having the pressure to take notes constantly or look in the computer when you’d rather be looking at the patient,” Boose says. “It’s really changed where I can actually have that dynamic of face-to-face time that whole visit.”
The technology doesn’t create a word-for-word transcript. Instead, it generates a draft that resembles something the physician would have written. But doctors must review every note for accuracy before signing off.
“It’s always got to be supervised,” Boose explains. “It will put everything together and look pretty convincing, and then you have to go through and edit and make sure for accuracy.”
Dr. Michael Forbes at Akron Children’s Hospital reports similar experiences. “It’s very accurate, but it’s not perfect,” he says. “All of our notes require us to read and correct them. A human being is in the loop and a human being controls the final output.”
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