'An unstable situation': How physicians should be using AI right now

How physicians should be using AI right now

Physicians navigating artificial intelligence (AI) face a genuine bind: use it and risk liability if something goes wrong, or avoid it and risk being seen as behind the standard of care.

Medical Economics asked Richard Anderson, M.D., FACP, chairman and CEO of The Doctors Company and TDC Group, for practical guidance. He was direct about the limits of any clean answer.

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"It is a very good question to which there really is no simple answer," Anderson said. The most concrete example he points to is ambient listening, AI tools that monitor and transcribe the doctor-patient encounter and organize it into a medical record entry that the physician then reviews and affirms. For many who have adopted the more sophisticated versions, he said, the response has been positive. The technology addresses a problem that electronic health records created: physicians spending hours after clinic entering documentation.

Anderson sees real value there, but he's not without skepticism. "It is a little unnerving that the solution to a technological problem created by electronic health records is another, more sophisticated technology," he said. "We have been down that road before."

The implication for physicians is that ambient listening represents perhaps the lowest-friction entry point into AI — one where the clinical risk is limited and the administrative payoff is tangible. Whether that pattern holds as AI moves deeper into diagnostic and treatment decisions is a different question entirely.