AI news & views of note: What patients think of AI scribes, 5 must-have principles for enterprise-wide adoption, more

Dave Pearson | December 16, 2025 | Health Exec | Artificial Intelligence

Physicians love AI scribes. Has anyone thought to ask patients what they think?

Actually, yes. Someone has. UC Davis Health emailed a well-designed survey on the topic to more than 9,000 of its healthcare consumers. Around 1,900 completed and returned the form. Here are highlights from the results.

Almost half the respondents, 48%, feel AI scribes are a sensible solution to the problem of doctors preoccupied with computers. One-third, 33%, are neutral toward the technology and 19% are unsettled by it. Surprisingly, younger patients (18 to 30 years old) are more scribe-skeptical than their elders. “A lot of people feel medical documentation is a necessary evil, but they hate it when their doctors are sitting in front of the computer, trying to record everything they’re talking about,” Gary Leiserowitz, MD, chair of OB/GYN at UC Davis and lead author of the survey report, tells UC Davis Health News. “They feel like that connection is lost.”
For wary patients, the most troubling aspects of AI medical scribes are accuracy (39%), privacy and security (13%) and the prospect of being recorded (13%). “Many of the associated comments expressed concerns that the recordings could be hacked,” the outlet reports. Meanwhile 10% fretted on behalf of physicians and staff, sensing the technology “might be bad” for them.
Asked to name the best time during their care experience to be informed that a digital tool would be taking notes, the participating patients strongly favored early notification. Specifically, they wanted to know while making an appointment, arriving at their doctor’s office or checking in at a clinic, UC Davis Health notes. More than half, 57%, would prefer to be notified face-to-face, while 45% are OK with email. “One of our important takeaways was that we had to educate patients about what the AI scribe could and could not do,” Leiserowitz says. “Security was a big deal, so when we were vetting vendors, we made sure they only use domestic servers.” He adds that physician-checked transcripts go into the EMR, but the recordings themselves get disappeared within 10 days. Further, patients are offered the opportunity to check their notes and make suggestions—or to opt out of the system altogether.
AI scribe technology can free up clinicians to speak with patients face to face rather than tapping keys and staring at a screen. Leiserowitz and colleagues make the point in the discussion section of their study, which is running in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. “Key to the acceptance of an AI scribe program is to educate the patient about the program in advance—through placard notifications in the clinic, EMR notices or verbal discussions—and obtain explicit verbal permission from the patient before use,” the researchers reiterate. “The patient must be allowed the option to opt out. Verbal consent should be documented in the patient’s clinic note.”
- Full study here, UC Davis’s own coverage here.

Health-system executives looking to adopt AI and robotics across the enterprise should consider 5 principles as absolutely essential.

Working together, these aspects allow leaders to move from innovation to sustained value creation—a core goal of value-based care. So state the authors of the list, researchers at Swansea University in the U.K. The five:

Outcome alignment at the pathway level. Leaders should agree on three to five patient-centered outcomes such as function after surgery and time-to-recovery and use these to evaluate AI and robotic solutions, advise Frederic Boy, PhD, and colleagues in a piece published Dec. 16 in Open Access Government.
Data collaboratives with guardrails. “Shared, privacy-preserving data access across primary, community and acute care enables models to be trained, validated and monitored consistently,” the authors write.
Work redesign before technology adoption. Redesigning pathways—“clarifying who does what, when and how information flows—ensures AI and robotics remove friction rather than add it,” Boy and co-authors state. “This is about ‘allocative value’ using the technology to optimize pathway efficiency and replace low-value activity.”
Trust by construction. Embedding clinical safety, transparency and bias monitoring from the outset, the authors propose, “ensures that digital systems enhance, rather than undermine, confidence with a human in the loop.”
Continuous learning loops. Regular review cycles, outcome dashboards and operational feedback “embed improvement as a habit, not a project.”
- AI will not fix healthcare on its own—leadership systems will. “When leaders prioritize redesign over deployment and learning over legacy, technology becomes a silent but powerful engine for value-based care,” Boy and colleagues conclude. “The next frontier of value-based healthcare will not be defined by the sophistication of algorithms but by the strength of leadership collaboration that connects innovation to purpose.”
  - Read the whole thing.

AI may scale impact—but the real force multipliers are the people willing to lead, fund and build with purpose.

So said Gerald Farrokh Daneshvar, MD, at a December healthcare conference in New York City hosted by the nonprofit Silverstein Dream Foundation with Beryl Elites Investment Conferences.

The organizers held the event not just to jawbone about AI in healthcare but to “align capital, leadership and technology around the future of healthcare,” according to coverage posted Dec. 14 in BioBuzz News. Daneshvar, of Ainsley & Born Capital and other organizations, evidently had a mic-drop moment when he expounded on his point above. “In one of the panel’s most resonant moments, Daneshvar reframed the very idea of a force multiplier,” BioBuzz reports. “AI may scale impact, he acknowledged—but the real multipliers are … the investors willing to fund responsibly, the founders committed to ethical stewardship and the clinicians determined to make healthcare work better than it does today. Technology can accelerate progress, but only human intention determines its direction.” Get the rest.

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Dave Pearson

Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.