Daniel Kahneman, the behavioral psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, distinguished between two modes of judgment: the quick, intuitive impressions that arise almost automatically and the slower, more effortful reasoning that questions them. A doctor must work in both. Often, I begin to sense a diagnosis as soon as I walk into a patient’s room, before I can fully explain it; when I write my notes, I tend to slow down to do my more deliberate thinking.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine

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In the E.R., interactions between patient and doctor rarely unfold neatly and logically. A patient starts with a description of chest pain, circles back to a fever, remembers a medication he stopped taking, mentions a family history of heart disease only after his wife prompts him, then adds one more symptom as the encounter is wrapping up. But the A.I. scribe converts that wandering, stuttering exchange into a tidy clinical synthesis — a miracle, it seems! The messy human sprawl of the visit returned to me clean and perfectly punctuated in less than a minute.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine

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For all of the exhilarating possibilities A.I. brings to medicine — diagnosing rare diseases, predicting individuals’ risks, discovering elusive drugs — one of its strongest footholds in health care today is its ability to eavesdrop on conversations and quickly generate notes from them.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine

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