How physicians actually use AI: May Lin, DO

May Lin, DO

Dr. May Lin has found that the most meaningful improvements in her daily work come from AI-powered medical scribing and patient communication.

“There are a lot of fancy bells and whistles and tools out there,” May says. “But the ones that have been really impactful in my day-to-day patient care have been around medical scribing.”

When she first began using an AI scribe, she remained skeptical. She would turn it on but didn’t trust it enough to rely on it fully. Instead, she continued documenting patient encounters manually. Over time, however, the technology improved significantly. “I would say that in the past couple of months, it has gotten to the point where the majority of my documentation is done by the AI scribe,” she says. “It gives me the ability to free up my eyes, my energy, my attention to really what I want.”

Lin tells her patients that the AI scribe is allowing her to focus on them, which is what she wants to do. “There are a lot of components to patient care that are just the necessary things in medicine, right? I have to document. I have to do orders, refer to specialists. I have to correspond with colleagues. But really, at the end of the day, as a physician, what I love to do is I love to hear from my patient. I love to listen. I love to understand and hear what’s happening with their health. How can we partner together to improve their health outcomes? That’s really what I’m interested in doing as a physician.”

AI has also helped her improve communication with patients outside the examination room. Many patient interactions happen through messaging, where Lin provides follow-up instructions and answers questions. “A lot of these messages, in my sort of doctor brain, can be done in short bullet points,” she says. “Follow up in six months. Make sure you get your lab work done before you come to your appointment. But when I am talking with my patient, I don’t talk to them in bullet points, right? I really talk to them as human beings.”

This is where AI helps her bridge the gap. Instead of spending extra time rewriting messages in a more conversational tone, she can use AI to refine them while ensuring they remain warm and empathetic.

These tools have also had a direct impact on her work-life balance. “I would say it’s probably cut pajama time by half,” she says. Although she notes that the time saved varies among physicians, the improvement is already significant for her. “Fifty percent for one clinician — that is already significant,” she says. “I think as the systems improve, it’ll probably cut more.”

Patients have responded positively to these innovations, although practicing in the tech-heavy Bay Area of San Francisco usually means her patients are pretty tech-savvy. “I always ask if it’s OK for me to turn on the AI scribe,” Lin says. “I’ll have patients who ask questions, but for the most part, no one has said no.”

She attributes this acceptance to her patient population’s familiarity with technology and the tangible benefits they experience. “Typically, what happens — my experience has been watching colleagues, students, patients — is that once they see how these tools can enhance their experience, whether on the patient side or the clinician side, they are very quick to adopt,” she observes. “A lot of the skepticism starts to melt away when they have a good understanding of how privacy is protected, how security is being respected, and then they just see that it works well.”

Looking ahead, she envisions tools that streamline processes like lab ordering, specialist referrals and test result reporting — all to make health care more patient-centered. “Anything that gets me to being a more patient-centered, relational-based clinician — I’m all for that,” she says.

Ultimately, she believes AI should enhance, not replace, the human elements of medicine. “The thing that the technology cannot do is understand a patient as a person,” she says. “One of the most powerful clinical tools I have as a clinician is being able to understand my patient’s psyche — what’s happening in their life that’s affecting their health. Those are things that a machine will never be able to diagnose.”