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.
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.
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.