Thoughts on emergency medicine, documentation, and building a better way.
The research says AI scribes save time and reduce burnout. But the tools available today weren't built for emergency medicine — and the gap between promising data and practical reality is wider than the marketing would suggest.
Most AI scribes weren't built for the chaos of emergency medicine. Here are the concrete failure modes—hallucinations, noisy multi-speaker audio, generic MDMs, and note bloat—and what an ED-ready scribe would need to do differently.
The documentation burden in emergency medicine isn't just a nuisance anymore. It's a structural crisis that's quietly hollowing out our specialty from the inside.