this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
53 points (96.5% liked)

Medicine Canada

372 readers
2 users here now

A community for Canadian physicians and medical professionals

🍁 While this community is intended for Canadian discussions, you are free to post about other medical systems. We're all in this together :)

Related Communities

For better links and descriptions, see the pinned post in the Medical Community Hub (!medicine@lemmy.world)

Rules

  1. No requests for professional advice or general medical information. Please do not solicit medical advice or share personal health anecdotes about yourself or others.

  2. No promotions, advertisements, surveys, or petitions.

  3. Link to high-quality, original research whenever possible: Posts which rely on or reference scientific data (e.g. an announcement about a medical breakthrough) should link to the original research in peer-reviewed medical journals or respectable news sources as judged by the moderators. Sensationalized titles, misrepresentation of results, or promotion of blatantly bad science may lead to removal.

  4. Act professionally and decently: /r/medicine is a public forum that represents the medical community and comments should reflect this. Please keep disagreement civil and focused on issues.

  5. Protect patient confidentiality. Please anonymize cases and remove any patient-identifiable information.

  6. No memes or low-effort posts: Memes, image links (including social media screenshots), images of text, or other low-effort posts or comments are not allowed.

These rules have been modelled after /r/medicine. While some rules were modified or skipped as this is a much smaller community, we can revisit the rules as we go. Thank you :)

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
otter@lemmy.ca
Dadifer@lemmy.world
streetfestival@lemmy.ca
53
Why you should refuse to let your doctor record you (buttondown.com)
submitted 3 months ago by streetfestival@lemmy.ca to c/medicine@lemmy.ca
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

At a recent appointment, Emily’s physical therapist (who knows some about her research) said, “Before we get started, there’s something I want to ask you about.” The something was an automatic “scribing” system their office is trialling for two weeks and deciding whether to purchase. These systems take in a (presumably audio-only) recording of the patient encounter and then output a draft patient note for the chart.

So what’s the big deal with “AI” charting? Here are nine reasons why we recommend refusing to consent to the use of scribing tools in healthcare settings:

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Wellllll.....

I'm fully against these systems, and fully against my data leaving the doctors office, but the "summarization in particular don’t need powerful hardware" is a bit of a stretch to put it mildly, especially when you start looking at what computers most doctors have to work with. The average doctor computer that I see still uses VGA cables for crying out loud, you won't see any AI on those machines ever.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Summarization is known for being one of the things weaker models can handle competently, and there are LLMs with very low system requirements:

239 tok/s decode on AMD CPU, 82 tok/s on mobile NPU. Runs under 1GB of memory

I don't know exactly what the minimum performance a model would have to have to do this specific task, but it seems very likely it could be done by something that can run on a phone, or other low powered hardware.