AI scribes save time; Canada's program shows where the savings go
More than 12,000 primary care clinicians have enrolled in Canada Health Infoway's national AI scribe program, and about 5,000 Ontario physicians use AI scribes. The tools listen to a clinical visit, with the patient's consent, and automatically draft the physician's notes. The argument is that AI keeps its narrow promise of saving time, but without proper frameworks it quietly adds new burdens that absorb those savings.
In the national program, half of clinicians put the time they saved into other administrative work, and one in five used it to add appointments.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The mechanism is less a shortcut than a reallocation: the saved time is real, but it gets absorbed by other administrative work or extra appointments. That makes the scribe a productivity tool for the system, not a break for the clinician.
Maybe that is the point: if one in five use the time to add appointments, the scribe is expanding capacity. The problem may be that the system has no way to let clinicians keep the gain.