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.

Why AI crisis advice may fail families facing psychosis

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

Health Technology

September 23, 2026

Every caregiver of someone with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder knows this moment: Someone you love is in crisis, and at some point (because it’s 2 a.m., because the on-call line is busy, because you don’t know what else to do) you open a browser or a chat window and type the question directly. What crisis resources are there for psychosis? What crisis resources are there for mania?

Those two questions aren’t …

How AI phone systems in health care create barriers

Thuy D. Bui, MD

Health Technology

September 23, 2026

Recently, I cared for a woman at a Pittsburgh shelter clinic whose blood pressure was dangerously elevated. She told me she had insurance through a regional health plan but had not seen a primary care physician in quite some time. I prescribed losartan, a common blood pressure medication, and e-prescribed it to a downtown CVS pharmacy. A week later, she returned. She had not received the medication.

The pharmacy had told …

AI data centers and public health demand regulation

Jacob Player, MD, MPH

Health Technology

September 23, 2026

Little has captured public awareness in recent years more than the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence (AI). With this rise has come a fair share of controversy, with many both inside and outside of health care claiming, or at least hoping, that it will bring about a revolution that improves patient care, improves patient outcomes, reduces physician workloads, and drives down health care costs. Many are eager adopters, hopeful to …

ChatGPT for triage: 5 rules I teach ER residents

Harvey Castro, MD, MBA

Health Technology

September 22, 2026

I work in Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) emergency departments where Spanish and English share the same hallway. Residents ask me the same question every block: Can we use ChatGPT for triage?

My answer is short. You can use it to practice thinking. You cannot use it to decide who waits. Here is what I actually teach on shift and in conference.

1. Fluency is not acuity

A clean English summary can hide a Spanish …

Automation bias in health care can become paternalism

John Wei, MD

Health Technology

September 21, 2026

I had a patient come in recently to discuss readings from her continuous glucose monitor. She was not diabetic and had no specific symptoms, but had purchased the direct-to-consumer device in the interest of obtaining more data about her health. The device had carefully captured her data and did periodically flag readings outside of the normal range. She had then run these reports through an AI chatbot, which, she explained …

4 workflow fixes that cut physician burnout at the source

Kevin Halow, MD, MBA

Health Technology

September 18, 2026

Introduction

If you ask any physician why they chose a career in health care, administrative documentation, tracking down patient information, or navigating the endless automated phone systems of external clinics are unlikely to be part of the answer. Most of us entered this field to care for human beings. Yet across nearly every specialty today, clinicians spend far more hours staring at computer screens, wrestling with EHR interfaces, and managing operational …

AI governance in health care has to reach the exam room

Amanda Heidemann, MD

Health Technology

September 17, 2026

Hospitals and health systems have spent the past several years building AI governance programs. They have formed committees, written policies, reviewed vendors, and debated where these tools belong in clinical care. That work matters.

But as a physician, I worry that too much of the conversation still stops short of the exam room. A health system can approve a tool, complete a compliance review, and satisfy a governance checklist while leaving …

Why haven’t ambient AI scribes boosted productivity?

Karan Kanwar

Health Technology

September 17, 2026

A physician finishes today’s note noticeably faster than they used to. The AI scribe listened, drafted, and closed most of the gap between seeing the patient and finishing the paperwork. At the end of the day? That’s less time hunched over a keyboard once the last patient leaves.

But ask, three months in, whether the practice is seeing more patients or capturing more revenue because of it. What comes back is …

Hospital IT approval has no path for clinician-built tools

Sanjay Khicha, MD and Gautam Nayak, MD

Health Technology

September 16, 2026

Six years ago, a man pulled off a highway in rural Washington because his chest hurt. The ER physician called Gautam, the cardiologist on call, 120 miles away. Nearly twenty minutes passed before he had the ECG. In rural Washington in 2019, you send an ECG by fax. By the time Gautam reviewed it and called back, the patient was coding. He died.

That story is about a fax machine. It …

Patient-centered device design is not bedside manner

Adeena Anwar Khan

Health Technology

September 16, 2026

This year I interned at Dr. Ziauddin Hospital during my biomedical engineering studies. Much of what I learned there was not to be found in books. At the moment it was standing next to a machine, doing its job perfectly, and the patient attached to it, looking totally lost.

Medical devices are manufactured to perform accurately. They have to be quick, believable to the physician that reads the number, fail-safe, and …

Rethinking the clinical utility of diagnostic tests

Martin Bello, PhD

Health Technology

September 15, 2026

Introduction

Approximately fifty years ago, while attending a social gathering at a suburban hospital with my first wife, I found myself speaking with an attending physician. During our conversation he made a remark that has remained with me throughout my professional life.

“Medicine is not science; it is an art.”

At the time, I accepted the statement without much reflection. Certainly medicine requires compassion, judgment, communication, and an appreciation for the complexity of …

Half of mental health apps vanish within 3 years

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

Health Technology

September 15, 2026

Every caregiver of someone with a serious mental illness knows the moment: You’re searching an app store at 2 a.m., looking for something, anything, that might help your loved one track symptoms, stay on a medication schedule, or just feel less alone between crises. You download it. You show them how to use it, gently, because trust is already fragile. And if you’re lucky, it becomes part of the routine …

Why clinical AI limitations are not a physician problem

Brian Hudes, MD

Health Technology

September 14, 2026

The most consistent advice physicians receive about clinical AI is that we should be more careful with it. Verify the output. Treat it as a draft. Structure the input. Build verification into practice as the defining skill of the coming decade.

All of this is good counsel. None of it addresses the problem the same authors have already correctly identified.

Harvey Castro made the diagnosis on this site in May 2025, writing …

How AI can cut administrative burden and wait times

Harry DiFrancesco, MBA

Health Technology

September 13, 2026

Health care in America is broken. We have an aging population that requires complex, ongoing care. We have rising costs. We have a workforce of clinicians who burned out. We don’t have enough clinicians. Today, the average wait time to schedule a new physician appointment in a major U.S. city is 31 days.

That is an entire month of waiting. For a patient managing a chronic condition, a 31-day wait …

AI governance metrics need a door-to-balloon time

Neel Chauhan, MD, MBA

Health Technology

September 12, 2026

During the following year, in one of the hospitals, an algorithm will be automatically taken out of service. Either the sepsis model will drift below the performance level at which it was approved, or the monitoring process will detect the tool failing for one subgroup of patients even though the overall figures remain satisfactory, and the system, which was designed to do just that, will suspend the model and wait …

Why prompt engineering for physicians fails at 2 a.m.

Brian Hudes, MD

Health Technology

September 12, 2026

Vinson James has found something that deserves more attention than it will get. Testing six large language models on validated pediatric board questions, he reports that accuracy ranged from 38 to 90 percent when the questions were delivered all at once, and converged to 83 to 88 percent when the same questions were delivered in batches of ten. Identical questions. Identical models. The only thing that changed was how the …

AI adoption in rural hospitals could fuel consolidation

Matt Hasan, PhD

Health Technology

September 11, 2026

A new national report on obstetric care should concern anyone worried about the future of American health care. Between 2010 and 2024, 718 U.S. hospitals lost obstetric services through unit or hospital closures. By 2024, 57.5 percent of rural hospitals had no obstetric services at all.

This is not simply a maternity-care problem. It is another warning that the economics of delivering health care in smaller communities are becoming increasingly difficult.

Now …

AI psychosis and the myth that disclosure protects patients

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

Health Technology

September 11, 2026

A few days ago, I wrote here that nobody has studied what happens when someone who already has a psychotic disorder uses an AI chatbot. I said we didn’t know yet whether these tools interact differently with an existing illness than they do with a previously stable mind.

We now have a name and a court file.

Michael Lines is a thirty-four-year-old competitive weightlifter from California who was diagnosed with bipolar …

A novel about AI and the drug risk its makers kept quiet

Craig Hauben, MPA

Health Technology

September 11, 2026

An excerpt from The AI: Breakout, the second book in The AI series, publishing in November.

Seth Ballard runs a private research lab built off the grid, deliberately outside the funding race. Niko is the researcher who evaluates what their model can do, and Darin is the partner who has funded the work from the beginning. What the model has just done is find something in approved medicine that no …

AI in peer review should be a second reader, not a judge

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Health Technology

September 10, 2026

I have often wondered why, among three reviews of the same biomedical research manuscript, one reviewer may dismiss nearly everything the authors have done, another may offer a moderate assessment, and a third may strongly favor publication. Human review remains essential, but human judgments can vary widely. Some disagreement is useful because reviewers notice different things. In other cases, the differences may reflect misunderstanding, fatigue, disciplinary preference, or bias. The …

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