The Timpanogos Regional Hospital emergency room is adopting artificial intelligence into its workplace.
“There are a lot of different AI scribe companies sort of popping up,” Dr. Justin Pearson, ER physician and the scribe manager at the Timpanogos Regional Hospital, said.
The facility currently employs student scribes as interns. Their role is to document patient diagnoses, tests and other treatments during physician visits.
“The biggest thing ... as a premed student (is) just being able to learn all of the terminology. But also being right next to the doctor day-to-day as they kind of go through the life of ... what you’ll be doing in the future has been a really awesome experience,” Jackson Schaap, head scribe, said.
The hospital's ER has employed scribes since 2012. They take the tedious tasks off physicians' hands, giving them more time to focus on providing better patient care, Pearson said.
However, some say new AI programs can complete scribe tasks even quicker and better than the interns.
“You just pull up the program on your phone ... then put it in your pocket and walk in, and the software listens to the conversation and transcribes it, essentially,” Pearson said.
Nurse practitioners and physicians' assistants are the primary users of the program right now. While it is not always accurate, but it has proven useful in such a fast-paced environment and a much cheaper option for the doctors, Schaap said.
“It’s just weighing the risks and benefits of it,” Pearson said.
While emergency room artificial intelligence has the potential to completely replace scribes in the future, the Timpanogos Regional Hospital ER does not plan to say farewell to their scribes just yet, Pearson said.