TL;DR

Nine physicians ran simulated primary care appointments twice over, once using AI scribes and once without, and the tools removed 69.1% of their documentation time. Researchers filmed every consultation to measure where the minutes went. Without the technology, note-taking consumed over a third of each appointment.

The finding nobody was looking for

The time saving is the headline. The interesting result is what happened to thinking.

Doctors using the scribes started reaching for scratch pads — jotting down questions and prompts so they would remember to follow them up. Lead researcher LaShawn Murray, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, said the striking thing was watching how building the chart during the appointment had itself been generating clinical questions. Take the typing away and something quietly goes with it, so the clinicians reinvented a manual substitute.

The workflow shifted too. Rather than alternating between patient and keyboard, physicians reviewed and corrected the machine’s draft afterwards, which meant fewer interruptions mid-consultation.

What it does and does not show

Two others share the authorship: Enid Montague, a professor at the same university, and Onil Bhattacharyya, a doctor based at Women’s College Hospital. The work follows an earlier comparison of six scribe products, three of which were carried into this round. It is deliberately Ontario-focused, because Canadian physicians work under privacy rules unlike their American counterparts — a reason UK readers should treat the number as indicative rather than transferable.

More to the point, the appointments were simulated. Murray is explicit that real clinics are the next question, along with whether patients want to be recorded at all, who can access those recordings, and what happens when one person in a full list declines.

Looking forward

Murray’s own framing has moved since 2023, from scribes solving the documentation problem to scribes being one piece of it — referrals, prescriptions, billing and regulatory work are untouched. That is the caution worth importing. Welsh ministers are currently evaluating scribe tools for public services, and NHS trusts scaling ambient documentation should budget for the same finding: the minutes come back, but some of the thinking has to be rebuilt somewhere else.