Technology
AI medical scribe
Software that drafts clinical notes from a conversation, replacing or assisting a human scribe.
An AI medical scribe is software that performs the documentation work historically done by a human medical scribe. Most modern products are *ambient* — they capture the visit audio and draft the note — but the category also includes voice-driven dictation tools with structured-note generation.
The category replaces, in whole or in part, the third party that used to type notes during a visit. The economic case is straightforward: human scribes cost tens of thousands per clinician per year; AI scribes cost a small fraction at comparable note quality.
The decisive evaluation question is *note quality and how little manual editing it needs* — a metric that's invisible from any spec sheet. We score it by hands-on testing.
See also
- Ambient AI scribe — AI that listens to a clinical encounter and drafts a structured note automatically.
- SOAP note — Standard four-part clinical note: Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan.
- AI hallucination — When an AI model writes something confidently into a note that was never said.