In Defense of Note Writing: Moral Formation and the Use of AI Scribes.

Abstract

Current discourse surrounding the use of AI note-writing scribes has focused primarily on questions of privacy, accuracy, and efficiency. Such analyses view note-writing as primarily serving summative and communicative purposes-tasks that can be offloaded to AI to relieve clinicians' documentation burden. We argue here that note-writing can also be understood as a process of moral and clinical formation, which both requires and instills important practical habits in clinicians. This formative aspect of note-writing should be considered in both institutional and individual decisions regarding the incorporation of AI scribes into clinical documentation.