A question is starting to surface in teaching hospitals: what happens to a doctor's training when software takes the notes?
According to STAT, the debate now centers on AI scribes — tools that listen in on a patient encounter and automatically draft the clinical note — and whether they belong in medical education. STAT frames the tension directly in its headline, asking whether AI scribes are "useful tools in medical education, or a crutch that imperils learning."
That framing captures two competing readings of the same technology. In one, an AI scribe is a straightforward assist: it removes documentation drudgery so that a trainee can spend more attention on the patient in front of them. In the other, the act of writing the note is itself part of the training — and handing it to a machine risks skipping a step that a student needs to climb.
STAT's piece is the source of this framing; the item available here is the headline itself, so the specific evidence, interviews, and institutional policies behind the argument are in STAT's reporting rather than summarized in this brief. Readers who want the details on how particular medical schools are handling AI scribes should go there.
What's notable is that the question is being asked at all. It signals that AI note-taking has moved past the pilot stage in clinical settings and into the part of medicine where habits are formed.
It matters because the choice being made now isn't just about paperwork — it's about what the next generation of physicians learns to do without help.