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Comment by thallavajhula | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for everywhere else, but here in the Bay Area (California), pretty much all hospitals use AI for transcription, summarizing, and some other stuff that I'm not fully aware of (I should really listen to what my Nurses say before agreeing to being recorded).

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My doctors office has started doing that and it throws the wildest crap into my chart. Diagnosis the doctor didn't mention, personal anecdotes that doc told me about their family become my family medical history. Test supposedly done that weren't.

Ive been trying to figure out some persistent si joint pain and my chart is full of me passing or failed tests nobody performed, observations nobody made and diagnosis that no doctor confirmed.

Its just so much wrongness, ive tried getting it corrected a few times when it really matters but its just so much wrong crap

Since it's brand new there are going to be a lot of subpar solutions on the market. When SSDs first came out, there were only a few models that were actually reliable.

It is relatively easy to create and deploy a transcription model. It's pretty hard to find one that is really accurate and to configure it with a good microphone setup and pair that with a fast but also intelligent LLM to clean things up. If you execute any of that poorly or pick a cheap not very smart model for privacy and or cost saving you could easily end up with nonsense.

That's great and all but maybe shoving AI into medical settings when it isn't ready isn't the right thing to do

Sure but this doesn't answer whether medical systems will see a lift from using AI.

(They will. It's very well suited to it, once the garbage gets filtered out. It's not like it's a scam as a whole, it's just a field that's very scammy rn.)

How have you determined AI is well suited to healthcare?

I'm not a hard drive. Human care requires higher standards. Ignoring that is to put profit above human safety.

Seems like i should be very grateful that i don't live in the bay area and you don't work for my doctor's IT department

This one showed up in HN a while ago

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-14/ai-medical-scribe-err...

AI transcribed chart said the patient took psychedelics when they never said that.

Speech to text is not exactly new technology.

Medical transcription isnt speech to text. The doctors I know at a major midwest provider had indian doctors live reading the speech to text and then filling out the chart which the doctor then signed off on. Now theyre using AI instead

no, but the quality jump in the last ~2 years is immense

as is translating text, deepl/google where okaisch, llm's are on another level

It depends. Transcriptions are now confidently and plausibly wrong.

(We use this for inbound phone calls and it’s just not reliable enough yet.)

Just out of interest, what model are you running?

Are you giving the model context? Industries XYZ with special words zyx

In our use case it's better then the human transcript comparison

I regularly see awfully wrong automatic translations on youtube in all kinds of videos.

Gemini making transcriptions of meetings and summarizing make so many mistakes. It will totally misinterpret what was said. I don’t think the tech is ready for something as important as medical transcription.

i mean, i am using 3.8 live to take notes in dialog mode, allowing it to asks questions.. its working fantasticly, switching between german/english with no effort and i have a rather hard accent

As far as we can see, its making exactly the same mistakes as it did before.

I refuse to let my medical providers use AI to do anything, they can pay a medical scribe if they want someone else to take notes during the visit.

I’m not letting them experiment with AI when it comes to my medical care.

Sure, but are there any examples of hospitals where lowered costs for transcriptions are significant enough to affect their financial reports? How much of an expense was it in the first place?

Same here in Ontario Canada fwiw

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