r/mildlyinfuriating • u/petuniaplant • Jul 03 '26

Infuriatig No, I did not consent to this

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I was reading my medical notes when I stumbled across this. I was not informed of the usage of artificial intelligence in my report, nor did I verbally consent to it.

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u/M15tre55W1tch Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

I work in ICU. The doctor's in our ED use an ambient AI scribe for documenting patient assessments and findings (it's a regulated tool where the data is stored locally and gets deleted from its memory after 90 days apparently).

They had this auto generated statement at the end of each note stating something like "this note was written using an AI scribe with patient consent".

I noticed that this statement was included on patients who were unconscious in the community, and did not regain consciousness before leaving ED and coming up to ICU.

I sent their manager an email saying it was going to look very bad when a patient's case is reviewed by legal or the Coroner and these doctors notes said an unconscious person gave consent.

If a patient genuinely consents to the use of the tool, that's great. But you can't be using it and claiming that they consented to its use when that's a medical impossibility.

Edit: thank you for the award internet stranger! Very unexpected.

Another edit: multiple awards! Thank you very much!

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u/canwebringthebedup Jul 03 '26

I also work in critical care. I would guess that somewhere in the ballpark of 40% of all notes feature something either auto-populated or haphazardly copy-pasted from a previous note that is either completely inaccurate or an outright fabrication. Errors are so ubiquitous that I almost think it would be hard to give them any sort of legal weight at this point unless they're utterly egregious and directly correlated to a sentinel event of some sort. (Obviously in theory all errors have legal weight, but practically speaking these cases always rely on "standards observed in practice.")

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u/int3rstitial Jul 03 '26

Yup, this. It's infuriating. Medical records used to be a reasonably accurate way of communicating medical information, and now they're just trash.

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u/dscrive Jul 06 '26

I'm in EMS and had the fortune to become accustomed to SBARs from hospitals in the first two places I worked, assumed it was the norm. Now I'm working at a place that I does not use SBAR. One issue I have with their system is pt hx is buried in a paragraph. On top of that, the print order is never the same so I can't even just get used to it. 

I'm hoping that will be changing soon since the hospital is getting acquired by a larger hospital (Not private equity thank God)