NHS watchdog: AI scribes are getting diagnoses and drug names wrong
Healthwatch England says AI tools that transcribe GP and hospital visits have produced wrong diagnoses and mixed-up medicines, sometimes only caught by patients.
What happened: Healthwatch England, the NHS's statutory patient champion, says AI "scribes" that listen to and transcribe doctor consultations have made serious errors. One woman was wrongly told her scan showed demyelination, a sign of possible MS, when the result was actually clear ("null demyelination") - a mix-up later blamed on a typo. In another case, a scribe recorded the wrong drug name for a prescription. A third summary left out a doctor's instruction to renew a migraine prescription. In each case, it was the patient, not medical staff, who spotted the mistake.
Why it matters: England's NHS 10-year plan leans heavily on AI scribes to cut paperwork and free clinicians' time, and 27 different scribe products are already in use across GP surgeries and hospitals. But the medicines regulator, the MHRA, has decided not to classify these tools as medical devices, meaning there's no NHS-wide system checking they're safe or accurate. Ministers have already been warned that trusts and doctors could face lawsuits if scribe errors harm patients, and there's still no clear route for patients to flag or correct mistakes in their own records.
How it works, plainly: Ambient AI scribes listen during an appointment and generate a transcript or summary that gets added to the patient's medical record, often without a doctor re-typing anything. Errors range from simple mishearings to "hallucinations," where the AI invents something never said - one GP found her scribe claimed she'd discussed a drug, Prozac, that never came up. Researcher Charlotte Blease found errors are more likely when several people are in the room, when a patient's medical history is complex, or when English isn't their first language. Yet over half of 1,003 GPs she surveyed felt AI notes were more accurate than their own.
The rollout: The promise is real: less scribbling, more eye contact, and NHS bosses expect the time saved to let GPs see roughly two more patients a day. But GP Shier Ziser Dawood warns that doctors still have to check every AI transcript for errors, so the tool isn't yet saving time - it's added a new task. Healthwatch and the Patients Association are calling for clear, well-publicised ways for patients to report and fix mistakes before trust erodes further, especially after separate complaints that an NHS AI phone receptionist in Rotherham struggled with strong regional accents.