Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 11/3/25

The American Medical Association recently announced the launch of its Center for Digital Health and AI. It stated that it was “created to put physicians at the center of shaping, guiding, and implementing technologies transforming medicine.”

AMA leaders went on to say, “The new Center will tap the full potential of AI and digital health by embedding physicians throughout the lifecycle of technology development and deployment to ensure it fits into clinical workflow and physicians know how to utilize it.”

It’s a nice sentiment, but it feels aspirational. I don’t think the AMA has the resources to embed physicians anywhere, let alone in the spaces where this kind of development is happening.

The statement add that AMA will create policy and provide leadership in the regulatory space; provide “knowledge and tools” for physicians and care delivery organizations to integrate AI into their practices; collaborate with tech, research, government, and healthcare to drive innovation; and creating opportunities for doctors to shape AI and digital tools so they work within clinical workflows and enhance patient and clinician experience.

The latter is particularly interesting to me. How, exactly, will they be creating these opportunities? Some US care delivery organizations refuse to acknowledge the value of the CMIO role, so perhaps they can start by lobbying those folks. Oracle Health has eliminated a tremendous number of physician roles. Will the AMA demand that product teams receive adequate input from physicians who have formal informatics training and experience?

If you surveyed a room full of physicians, I’m not sure they would identify the AMA as an organization that looks out for the interests of frontline clinical providers. In the 1950s, approximately 75% of practicing physicians were members of the AMA. The best estimates I could find for recent years had estimates between 12% and 20%. If that’s accurate, it shows that physicians are voting with their pocketbooks. Dues are $420 per year for practicing physicians, which is a lot to ask from folks who don’t feel that the membership brings value.

It seems like an uphill battle advocate for more physician involvement in the development and implementation of AI tools. Organizations that already see the value of having physicians involved in the process are doing so. Given the cost of hiring a physician, it would be a hard sell for those that don’t already have a line item for that expertise in their budgets. A number of my physician informatics colleagues are concerned about keeping their current roles, since we’ve seen numerous CMIO and informatics roles eliminated either as part of the ever-growing list of health system mergers and acquisitions or just as a part of general restructuring efforts.

It will be interesting to circle back to this press release in six to 12 months to see if the AMA has gained traction with its efforts.

Speaking of look-back efforts, I took a look through my own retrospectoscope this week when I was digging through some paperwork. I found a sheet of notes from an AI symposium last year. It was about the impacts of generative AI on physicians, and featured a couple of physician executives talking about their health systems’ use of AI. I have a habit of capturing quotes when people are speaking. Some of the comments still ring true, but others haven’t stood the test of time. Let’s take a look:

• “AI-powered analytics are great, but individual reporting freaks physicians out.” Many physicians have been resistant to seeing individual measures for years, so no surprise here. This will continue to be true as far as I’m concerned.
• “I’m cautiously optimistic about generative AI in clinical applications; it seems like just one more thing.” I’d say this one is 50/50. We’ve seen tremendous growth in AI over the last year, but we’re also seeing a little bit of a backlash in some circles.
• “AI is going to bring back the humanity in medicine. We will actually have time with patients rather than just taking a bill-and-go approach.” I’ll give 50/50 on this one as well. Studies have shown that where AI does provide some reduction in note generation times, physicians aren’t necessarily having longer patient-facing appointments or even spending less time in the EHR. We need more and better research in this regard.
• “By 2025, this is totally going to bring the joy back into medicine.” I’m giving a thumbs down to this one, since we are well through 2025 and there are plenty of ways in which physicians still find the mechanics of medical practice to be soul-sucking.
• “Data quality isn’t attractive. It’s not going to wind up on a movie poster.” I know quite a few people who thrill at the sight of beautifully normalized clean data, so beauty is in the eye of the beholder on this one. As a side note, I once saw a revenue cycle team that had shirts that said, “We put the sexy back in billing,” so I bet those folks would find data quality attractive too.
• “Vendors kind of care about health, but really want to make money.” All too true, although it’s a continuum.
• “Just because it has AI in the name doesn’t mean it’s useful.” True on this one as well.
• “I hate the subscription model. You used to be able to just buy stuff.” This one is just as true today as it was last year.
• “I’m tired of hearing about ‘move fast and break things.’ Vendors need to move fast, but also heal their broken things just like hospitals do.” I don’t think there’s a CMIO out there that would disagree with this one.
• “AI is just giving us an escalating arms race of appeals and denials. They say we’re diagnosing too much sepsis even though they wanted us to find sepsis sooner.” The arms race is real. There’s a headline almost every week about care delivery organizations and payers taking approaches that counter each other. It reminds me of ‘’Spy vs. Spy” in Mad Magazine.
• “Ambient documentation adoption will be limited because the operations people want a tangible ROI. How do you put a dollar amount on physician wellbeing? Our arguments about turnover and recruitment fall on deaf ears. They’ll probably just pass the cost on to clinicians.” I’ve seen health systems charge physicians for their ambient licenses or alternatively demand increased productivity in order to stay licensed, so I’ll say true on this one.

My favorite quote was when one of the speakers encouraged the audience (which included not only clinicians but also IT, operations, and finance colleagues) to “go play with ChatGPT and try to make it do the part of your profession that you hate.” It’s an interesting challenge, although I struggle with trying to find ways to add AI tools to my non-clinical workflows. I’m curious what others have done and whether it’s really making your work life better or if you have seen unintended consequences.

What odious parts of your work have you outsourced to AI tools? Have you been unsuccessful in automating others? Leave a comment or email me.

Email Dr. Jayne.