Health technology

1,606 articles · Since 2004

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.

Latest articles

I build clinical decision support. It does not decide.

Brandy Zachary, DC

November 6, 2026Nov 6, 2026

Last month I wrote here about how AI is changing what patients expect their clinicians to know. Medicine does not have an information problem. It has an interpretation problem. The chart is full. What is missing is someone with the…

In the weeks since, the conversation has moved, and it moved fast. Building clinical decision support has made me ask a related question. …

Why the numbers your executives and board read are wrong

Thomas Powell, MD

November 5, 2026Nov 5, 2026

When a potassium of 8.8 comes back on a patient who looks well and the one before was 4.1, no experienced physician treats that number first. The first question is whether the value is correct, and the second is how the specimen was drawn and transported. A tourniquet left on too long, a small-bore needle, a slow draw, and red cells shear and spill potassium into the tube. The result …

Who pays physicians to catch AI medical errors?

Brian Hudes, MD

November 5, 2026Nov 5, 2026

Medical AI is deployed on the assumption that a physician will catch its mistakes. One new study asks what happens when the advice is wrong on purpose. In a 2026 medRxiv preprint that has not been peer-reviewed, the authors gave…

Medical AI is deployed on the assumption that a physician will catch its mistakes. One new study asks what happens when the advice is wrong on purpose.

In a 2026 medRxiv preprint that has not been peer-reviewed, the authors gave 225 physicians written neurocritical-care cases with AI advice attached. When the advice was deliberately steered toward a harmful choice, physicians made a harmful decision in 49.4 percent of the targeted decisions. …

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Shadow AI: why clinicians paste patient data into chatbots

Harvey Castro, MD, MBA

November 5, 2026Nov 5, 2026

It's 3 a.m. There's a septic patient in room 6 and someone intoxicated yelling in the hallway. A 78-year-old on eleven medications is going home, and her daughter needs discharge instructions she can actually follow. The hospital's approved AI tool…

It’s 3 a.m. There’s a septic patient in room 6 and someone intoxicated yelling in the hallway. A 78-year-old on eleven medications is going home, and her daughter needs discharge instructions she can actually follow. The hospital’s approved AI tool sits behind two logins and only runs on a desktop. The chatbot on your phone opens with one tap.

Most clinicians I know have felt that pull. Some have given in.

Late …

Chatbots and schizophrenia: the isolation no one measures

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

November 4, 2026Nov 4, 2026

Three Cornell researchers made an argument in STAT on Oct. 26 that deserves more attention than it will get. A chatbot "could be safe in every single conversation with a user," they wrote, and still cause harm by slowly replacing…

Three Cornell researchers made an argument in STAT on Oct. 26 that deserves more attention than it will get. A chatbot “could be safe in every single conversation with a user,” they wrote, and still cause harm by slowly replacing that person’s human relationships over months. Qian Yang, Ned Cooper, and Ibrahim Emara point out that nearly every safeguard now in place, from crisis detection to break reminders to …

Schizophrenia relapse prevention apps need a family contact

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

November 2, 2026Nov 2, 2026

A patient in a German schizophrenia trial got worse for weeks. The smartphone app built to catch it raised no alert during that stretch, because the worsening stayed just below its threshold. After declining a hospital admission, the patient stopped using the app and stopped answering calls. The care team found out what happened only when study staff phoned the family member listed as an emergency contact. The patient had …

Why AI trained on clinical notes misses the medicine

John C. Ferguson, MD

November 1, 2026Nov 1, 2026

Six weeks into my internship, on a Sunday morning at the VA, I ran my first code. The patient was POD#5 from a CABG and going home that day. The cardiothoracic attending had rounded early and pulled his pacing wires.…

Six weeks into my internship, on a Sunday morning at the VA, I ran my first code.

The patient was POD#5 from a CABG and going home that day. The cardiothoracic attending had rounded early and pulled his pacing wires. I had never met the attending. I had never met the patient. I got called because the man went into afib while getting dressed.

The floor nurses weren’t permitted to push beta-blockers, …

How much time do AI scribes really save physicians?

Brian Hudes, MD

October 30, 2026Oct 30, 2026

Doctors report feeling better with AI scribes. The measured time savings are smaller than many of them perceive, and the work of checking the AI is still unpriced. In a 2026 study of 252 physicians in the American Journal of…

Doctors report feeling better with AI scribes. The measured time savings are smaller than many of them perceive, and the work of checking the AI is still unpriced.

In a 2026 study of 252 physicians in the American Journal of Managed Care, 86.5 percent said an AI scribe reduced their documentation time. The authors also measured documentation time directly. They found no significant association between the change a physician perceived and …

An AI scribe records the words, not the patient

Nancy Jiang, MD

October 29, 2026Oct 29, 20262

Last month I sat in on yet another demo for a new ambient AI scribe tool, the kind that's supposed to turn a recorded visit into a clean note by the time you walk out of the room. It was…

Last month I sat in on yet another demo for a new ambient AI scribe tool, the kind that’s supposed to turn a recorded visit into a clean note by the time you walk out of the room. It was good. Really good. Good enough that I left thinking about all the charting I wouldn’t have to do that night, and also thinking about something else, which is that the …

AI in radiology: A missing flag is not a negative read

Harvey Castro, MD, MBA

October 29, 2026Oct 29, 2026

Picture a busy ED at 1 a.m. A CT pulmonary angiogram comes back from the scanner. The worklist shows no AI flag for pulmonary embolism. The radiologist has 30 studies in the queue. The patient's heart rate is still 112.…

What does the missing flag mean? A new study says: less than most of us assume.

On Oct. 21, researchers at Emory published a look at two FDA-cleared PE detection algorithms …

Accessibility is not a device. It is an ecology.

Dr. Roshan Agarwal & Roshni Nair

October 28, 2026Oct 28, 2026

"Yeh kaise aaye hai?" This first comment followed us through the wooden doors of the theater, accompanied by snickering from the group of young boys who had said it. Inside, the lobby was flooded with bright fluorescent light, movie posters…

“Yeh kaise aaye hai?”

This first comment followed us through the wooden doors of the theater, accompanied by snickering from the group of young boys who had said it. Inside, the lobby was flooded with bright fluorescent light, movie posters stretched from floor to ceiling, and the overpowering smell of buttered popcorn and samosas. My family waded through it, working my grandmother’s wheelchair through the clusters of people. I was ten …

Accelerated TMS: 5 questions families should ask first

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

October 28, 2026Oct 28, 2026

Psychiatrist Ravi Singareddy did something rare in his recent KevinMD piece on accelerated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): He slowed the hype down. SAINT's open-label pilot reported remission in about 90 percent of completers. Under sham control, remission was closer to…

Psychiatrist Ravi Singareddy did something rare in his recent KevinMD piece on accelerated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): He slowed the hype down. SAINT’s open-label pilot reported remission in about 90 percent of completers. Under sham control, remission was closer to 50 percent versus 21 percent. SWIFT showed that an accelerated deep TMS course could match a standard one, reaching remission about a week sooner. His conclusion: “Faster” is not …

AI in health care saves time. Why does work keep growing?

Tiffiny Black, DM, MBA, MPA

October 27, 2026Oct 27, 20262

A physician finishes documentation 30 minutes earlier because an artificial intelligence tool is working exactly as promised. Six months later, those 30 minutes are gone. Not because the technology failed. Not because the physician stopped using it. The organization simply…

A physician finishes documentation 30 minutes earlier because an artificial intelligence tool is working exactly as promised. Six months later, those 30 minutes are gone.

Not because the technology failed. Not because the physician stopped using it. The organization simply found another use for the time. Another appointment. Another responsibility. Another expectation.

Eventually, yesterday’s efficiency becomes today’s ordinary workload. And when the next technology promises to save another 30 minutes, who asks …

Read clinical AI the way you read an incomplete chart

J. Wayne Saul, MD

October 27, 2026Oct 27, 2026

Every shift, I read charts that are missing something. The patient can't tell me when the pain started. The outside records haven't come through. The family remembers a different medication list than the pharmacy does. I am not going to…

Every shift, I read charts that are missing something.

The patient can’t tell me when the pain started. The outside records haven’t come through. The family remembers a different medication list than the pharmacy does. I am not going to get a complete account, and waiting for one is how people die in hallways. So I do what emergency physicians do: I work from what is actually in front of me, …

I expected skepticism at Grand Rounds. I got a conversation.

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

October 27, 2026Oct 27, 2026

This past Friday, October 23, I stood in front of a variety of clinicians sponsored by Harvard Medical School for Grand Rounds. I am not a clinician. I'm a mother whose daughter lives with schizophrenia, and I've spent years mapping…

This past Friday, October 23, I stood in front of a variety of clinicians sponsored by Harvard Medical School for Grand Rounds. I am not a clinician. I’m a mother whose daughter lives with schizophrenia, and I’ve spent years mapping the space between the appointment and my kitchen table at 2 a.m.

I expected polite skepticism. What surprised me most was how open the room was to the entire conversation. Here …

AI medical devices and the check nobody pays for

Brian Hudes, MD

October 27, 2026Oct 27, 2026

Medical AI is deployed on the assumption that a clinician will review its work. I found no payer that prices the review. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now cleared 1,614 AI-enabled medical devices. By analyst Chi-way Li's count,…

Medical AI is deployed on the assumption that a clinician will review its work. I found no payer that prices the review.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now cleared 1,614 AI-enabled medical devices. By analyst Chi-way Li’s count, at least 79 have payment of their own; most of the rest are bought from hospital budgets or ride inside tests insurers already cover. Yet whenever an AI read, note, or …

Remote patient monitoring in psychiatry needs an owner

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

October 26, 2026Oct 26, 2026

In a recent KevinMD piece, physician executive Thomas Powell argued that alert fatigue is a design problem, not a vigilance problem. When clinicians override 49 to 96 percent of drug-interaction alerts, he wrote, they aren't being careless. They're responding sensibly…

One of his tests for retiring an alert stopped me: If no one will claim …

AI in health care must not cost us our human skills

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

October 25, 2026Oct 25, 2026

Artificial intelligence, robotics, and other emerging technologies are transforming health care at an extraordinary pace. Their potential is enormous, and their development is both welcome and increasingly necessary. As populations age, health care systems will face growing demands for medical…

As populations age, health care systems will face growing demands for medical care, rehabilitation, long-term support, and assistance for people with disabilities. Meanwhile, the volume of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge has expanded beyond what any individual clinician can reasonably master. AI-assisted clinical decision …

Fax in health care costs hospitals more than they realize

Anita L. Carson, DBA

October 23, 2026Oct 23, 20264

Health care delivery organizations face substantial budgetary pressures. U.S. health care organizations face heavy administrative burdens that consume nearly a quarter of all health care spending, amounting to $950 billion in 2021. Adding to the financial strain, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July 2025, will reduce Medicaid spending by at least $700 billion over the next 10 years, with 20 states’ Medicaid budgets …

Predictive AI in health care flags risk. Who acts on it?

Dr. Sarima Chinda

October 23, 2026Oct 23, 20262

Artificial intelligence is transforming health care's ability to anticipate disease, identify vulnerable populations, and support clinical decision-making. From predicting hospital readmissions to identifying individuals at increased risk of chronic conditions, AI-powered technologies promise to make health care more proactive, efficient,…

Artificial intelligence is transforming health care’s ability to anticipate disease, identify vulnerable populations, and support clinical decision-making. From predicting hospital readmissions to identifying individuals at increased risk of chronic conditions, AI-powered technologies promise to make health care more proactive, efficient, and responsive. However, while considerable attention has been devoted to improving the accuracy and sophistication of these technologies, a more fundamental question remains insufficiently addressed: What happens after a patient …

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