Ambient scribes as narrative technologies.

Ambient scribes as AI voice-to-text tools are widely promoted for saving clinician time, but their risks are often unacknowledged and can undermine patient-centred care.

• Why it matters: Current deployments miss clinically relevant aspects of patient experience, leaving narrative harms insufficiently understood. This threatens care quality and trust during clinical encounters.
• What they did: Drawing on medical humanities scholarship, the work critiques existing narrative interpretation approaches and proposes three integrations: centring patient perspectives, accounting for material and social structures, and treating encounters as nodes in broader narrative systems.
• The result: It outlines five rollout priorities for commissioners, administrators, clinical leaders, and practice managers to prevent deepening harms and to support more humane, trustworthy care.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.