ArticleNPJ digital medicine2021
The digital scribe in clinical practice: a scoping review and research agenda.
Article in NPJ digital medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Healthcare Professionals' Perceptions of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare-A Systematic Review of Qualitative Studies.Journal of advanced nursing · 2026Pooled it
- Evidence on artificial intelligence-assisted clinical documentation and healthcare workers' emotional wellbeing at work: a scoping review.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
- Clinical Implementation of Artificial Intelligence Scribes in Health Care: A Systematic Review.Applied clinical informatics · 2025Pooled it
- The Impact and Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare: Systematic Review.Current topics in medicinal chemistry · 2025Pooled it
- Determinants of AI Scribe Adoption in Allied Health: Mixed Methods Study Guided by the Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation Model for Behavior Change.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Contextualizing the frontier designs, uses, and risks of artificial intelligence in family medicine: Introducing the AI Corner column.Canadian family physician Medecin de famille canadien · 2026Article
- Prompt-directed ambient artificial intelligence for automated multidisciplinary tumor board documentation.Annals of oncology : official journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology · 2026Article
- The Use of Ambient Dictation Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Spaces in Surgery: A Scoping Review.World journal of otorhinolaryngology - head and neck surgery · 2026Review
- For the record: a narrative review of ambient voice technology in clinical documentation for dentistry and wider healthcare.British dental journal · 2026Review
- Large Language Model Summarization of Physician-to-Physician Calls for Interhospital Transfer of Patients With ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction: Observational Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Observational
- From Clinical Encounter to Draft Documentation: A Mechanistic Narrative Review of Ambient Scribe Technology.Cureus · 2026Review
- Evaluation of an AI Scribe Tool in the Emergency Department: A Single-Arm Observational Study.Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA · 2026Observational
- Automatic Speech Recognition in Healthcare in the Post-LLM Era: A Scoping Review.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Validating Digital Scribes: A Scoping Review of Evaluation Practices and Clinical Use.Journal of medical systems · 2026Article
- Personalised health plan development using agentic AI in Singapore's national preventive care programme: a pilot study.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Vision-Enabled AI scribes reduce omissions in clinical conversations: evidence from simulated medication histories.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Evaluating ambient artificial intelligence documentation: effects on work efficiency, documentation burden, and patient-centered care.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2026Article
- When better data meets better design: How EHR data usability and system usability shape physicians' cognitive load.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- The Current State of Digital Scribes in Primary Care: A Scoping Review.Journal of medical systems · 2026Article
- Remote Therapeutic Monitoring in Musculoskeletal Pain Medicine: A Systematic Review and Comparison with Remote Physiologic Monitoring.Journal of pain research · 2026Review
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The number of clinician burnouts is increasing and has been linked to a high administrative burden. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques may address this issue by creating the possibility of automating clinical documentation with a "digital scribe". We reviewed the current status of the digital scribe in development towards clinical practice and present a scope for future research. We performed a literature search of four scientific databases (Medline, Web of Science, ACL, and Arxiv) and requested several companies that offer digital scribes to provide performance data. We included articles that described the use of models on clinical conversational data, either automatically or manually transcribed, to automate clinical documentation. Of 20 included articles, three described ASR models for clinical conversations. The other 17 articles presented models for entity extraction, classification, or summarization of clinical conversations. Two studies examined the system's clinical validity and usability, while the other 18 studies only assessed their model's technical validity on the specific NLP task. One company provided performance data. The most promising models use context-sensitive word embeddings in combination with attention-based neural networks. However, the studies on digital scribes only focus on technical validity, while companies offering digital scribes do not publish information on any of the research phases. Future research should focus on more extensive reporting, iteratively studying technical validity and clinical validity and usability, and investigating the clinical utility of digital scribes.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.