AI Scribes Can Boost Your Doctor’s Productivity and Reduce Burnout Rates
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, May 29th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. The government is turning to outer space to get rural areas of America online. But who does it really benefit? Then, doctors used to be the ones summarizing appointments with patients. Now, there's an AI tool for that. Why some experts say this only scratches the surface of how artificial intelligence can be deployed in medicine.

But first, 24 million Americans lack reliable broadband internet access. Fiber optic cables offer the most reliable long-term service, but they're expensive to install. So satellites have become a much cheaper and quicker alternative, especially for rural areas of the country. WSJ reporter Patience Hagen has written about a growing number of states now rolling out subsidies for satellite connectivity. Patience, why are these states switching to a fiber-first strategy?

It's happening now because satellite internet has, in some ways, it's finally caught up in terms of quality and price. It's a realistic, cost-effective option.

Satellite internet used to be a lot more shaky. Now it's much better. It's still not nearly as reliable as fiber optic cables, but a lot of states are turning to it because it can be a lot less expensive than laying fiber optic cables out to one remote house that might be miles away from anything else. For some of these super remote locations,

It can get into the six figures. And states are typically pretty reluctant to subsidize that with public funding. So they end up choosing satellite as a compromise.

And this funding is coming from a Biden-era program that focused on broadband, but it's the Commerce Department now that is working to overhaul it to be essentially tech agnostic. Is that right? Yes, they absolutely are. This program was designed to bring broadband high-speed internet to every location in the country that still doesn't have it. And under the Biden administration, it was expected to favor fiber, which

The Biden administration designed the program's rules in a way that said you had to build fiber cables to every location unless it was too expensive. Then you could turn to other technologies like satellite. So satellite was expected to be part of the mix and receive some of the funding under the Biden administration. But now with the reforms that the Trump administration is talking about, it looks poised to receive a lot more of this funding.

And how soon could those reforms happen? The Commerce Department is reviewing it. So we're all waiting to find out when the new guidance comes. Virtually every state broadband office is in a holding pattern right now. Some states that had their plans all written up still can't get their funds. And other states are paused and wondering whether they'll have to rewrite their plans for the new guidance.

Could this change be a boon for companies like Elon Musk's Starlink or Amazon's new satellite program? Who really stands to benefit from these changes, aside from just consumers who get internet faster and maybe cheaper? The companies that stand to benefit from this are Elon Musk's Starlink.

which is a unit of SpaceX and is already providing satellite internet service, and Amazon's Project Kuiper, a new initiative that isn't providing service yet but is already launching satellites and is already winning government contracts to provide service.

That was Patience Hagen, a reporter covering digital advertising and broadband for The Wall Street Journal. Coming up, AI scribes are saving doctors time and helping to reduce burnout rates. But what does it mean for you as a patient? That conversation after the break.

Marketers, you know that feeling when your content just works? When you crush a viral trend before 10 a.m.? That's Contentful. Dynamic content made blissfully simple. Contentful helps you create and launch personalized experiences instantly across any digital channel. No limits. No stress. Only possibilities. Come get the feels at Contentful.com.

If you've ever been to the doctor and forgotten bits and pieces of the conversation that might have been helpful once you got home, ambient listening software might be the solution. It's a kind of AI that's being deployed in some outpatient appointments, and doctors have been finding it useful to summarize conversations while filtering out all the casual chit-chat about weather and sports. WSJ contributor Laura Landreau has written about these new documentation methods. Laura, how widespread is the adoption of this kind of tech?

Overall AI usage, which includes usage for all kinds of help with diagnostic thinking,

getting information and guidelines. It's out there quite a bit, but this is a new and very interesting application of AI, which is what they call ambient listening, which is almost as if the hospital walls or the doctor's walls may have ears. It's a technology that actually captures what happens in the doctor-patient encounter or in any medical encounter,

and transcribes it, but not just like a regular transcription. It actually

focuses just on the important things that are being said, gets the ambient chit-chat out, things like how was the weather, what did you do this weekend, and differentiates between voices. It's just starting to be widely adopted, but a lot of it is starting out in those big healthcare systems. It's an academic medical center. It has hospitals, doctor's offices. So it's a lot of the bigger systems, but of course, a lot of healthcare now is being consolidated into bigger systems.

just for economies of scale. So you'll see it when you go to Stanford Healthcare, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, big systems like Ardent Healthcare, which is based in Tennessee and has hospitals in many different states.

And one of those chief medical information officers you spoke to for your story said that this is really just scratching the surface of what AI can do in doctors' offices. So if it's doing sort of the things that humans might do, if after an appointment a doctor might record some notes and then a transcriptionist types those up, what more then could AI do to make doctors' and patients' lives easier? Dr.

One of the things they're looking at it having be a 360 degrees before, during, after the medical visit.

So the AI starts looking into the fact that there's going to be a doctor's appointment and they start gathering data like this needs to be followed up on from the previous test or this is a result that came that we never really did anything about or this is what the patient has been complaining about. So it starts off the appointment with the doctor being a little more informed about what this patient's issues are. And then during the appointment, it's picking up new discussions of symptoms and

maybe suggesting guidelines as the doctor is talking to the patient, a medical guideline. Now it's not diagnosing because that's the doctor's job, but it might say if this patient is recording that he feels a certain fatigue or that he's got low blood sugar feelings, it might say something like he should be checked, he or she should be checked for a diabetes test. Maybe you need to give them a certain blood test.

And then afterwards, there isn't going to be any human scribe doing that, but the doctor absolutely must review the note. Nothing is done until the doctor passes on it. So it isn't like AI is taking over everything, but AI is supposedly making the doctor's job easier. And there's been a lot of studies that have shown that it's already reduced burnout. The doctors feel that it's so much more helpful.

It's all been transcribed, and then they can review it and see if there's anything else that they need to change or add. But it's knocked off precious minutes of the time at the end of their workday that they have to look at these notes, create these notes, write them from scratch. So it's helpful to help doctors prompt but not diagnose. Still, though, I can almost hear our listeners laughing.

screaming, wait, what about things like patient privacy or hallucinations when AI just makes things up? How are providers accounting for all of that? And is there ability for some patients, if they don't want AI listening, they would prefer a doctor to just take notes on their own. Is there an ability to opt out of that? Oh, absolutely. The permission of the patient has to be obtained. It's consent.

And as long as the patient consents, they can say, yes, this is what we're going to do. And of course, the patient gets a summary afterwards, which they can look at and say, that's not what I said. And by the way, yes, hallucinations, we all know that that's a problem in AI, and it hasn't completely gone away by any means. There was a study that came out of Kaiser Permanente, a Permanente medical group, which is out in California, that

And in the study that they did, they found a few instances of hallucination. They said in one example, the physician mentioned scheduling a prostate examination and the AI scribes summarized that a prostate examination had been performed.

And then in another, the doctor mentioned issues with the patient's hands, feet, and mouth. And the AI summary recalled the patient being diagnosed with hand, foot, and mouth disease. So not always 100% correct, which is why everybody who's using this will tell you right up front that

The doctor has to review it. The clinician is the last word. Are there any other risks associated with this technology? We all know about data breaches. One of the things that these AI scribe technologies do is the actual recording is not maintained. In other words, the recording is transcribed.

and checked by the physician, but then it's gone. It's not something that they're keeping on some server somewhere that someone's going to hack. That was Laura Landreau, a contributor for The Wall Street Journal. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

Marketers, you know that feeling when your content just works? When you crush a viral trend before 10 a.m.? That's Contentful. Dynamic content made blissfully simple. Contentful helps you create and launch personalized experiences instantly across any digital channel. No limits. No stress. Only possibilities. Come get the feels at Contentful.com.