Doctors using AI to summarize appointment details

[surprising]

Went for annual PCP appointment recently and was asked if it's OK for the doctor to record the conversation. I said OK. When I got my post appointment summary notes, it was clear that it was AI generated. Mostly it was fine and thorough but there were some funny parts that a human wouldn't say. For example, I mentioned that tennis elbow was worse recently due to lots of overuse during rental renovation like screwing motion with a screwdriver. The summary said that my tennis elbow was worse due to screwing

 

[Out of Steam]

Even before AI, I have found some of the checkoff items used in medical visit summaries nonsensical.

 

[Koolau]

Went for annual PCP appointment recently and was asked if it's OK for the doctor to record the conversation. I said OK. When I got my post appointment summary notes, it was clear that it was AI generated. Mostly it was fine and thorough but there were some funny parts that a human wouldn't say. For example, I mentioned that tennis elbow was worse recently due to lots of overuse during rental renovation like screwing motion with a screwdriver. The summary said that my tennis elbow was worse due to screwing

If you're not joshing us about the AI report, I'd like to think most docs would review what AI came up with and edit accordingly. Of course, that might not be as much fun.

 

[donheff]

If you're not joshing us about the AI report, I'd like to think most docs would review what AI came up with and edit accordingly. Of course, that might not be as much fun.

I agree. No professional should let such a summary out without review. These models are getting very good but they can still occasionally hallucinate. I will note that I have used LLMs to clarify and summarize confusing medical reports with tables of data. I ran a page with a dozen tables through OCR and fed the resulting JSON files and text to Perplexity. It was able to work with but told me that text was better in this case. The summaries were excellent. DW had a confusing report from a Hopkins study she participates in. The LLM summarized it in layman's terms that were very helpful to her.