Should Your Doctor's Appointment Be Recorded? Psychiatry, AI scribes, and more with Dr. Arpan Parikh
Should Your Doctor’s Appointment Be Recorded? Psychiatry, AI scribes, and more with Dr. Arpan Parikh
Three years ago, if a patient had asked to record their appointment, Dr. Arpan Parikh says he would have had an allergic reaction. Today, recording is on the first page of his consent form.
Ambient AI scribes have been adopted faster than almost any tool in medicine, so doctors now routinely record their patients. Arpan argues that patients should be able to ask for the same thing back, and that a recording protects a doctor doing a good job as much as it protects the patient.
My guest is Dr. Arpan Parikh, co-founder and CEO of Kin, an app patients bring to their doctor’s appointments to record the visit and keep track of what was said. Arpan is a psychiatrist, double board certified in general psychiatry and addiction medicine. He was most recently Chief Medical Officer at SOL Mental Health, and he still sees patients.
We discuss:
- Why Arpan went from resisting patient recordings to recording his own visits
- What clinicians might lose when an AI writes their notes for them
- Why psychiatry is probably the specialty most resistant to change, and why that shouldn’t stop progress
- Why he compares recording doctors to putting body cams on police officers
- His view that the companies collecting our health data are now mostly collecting AI slop
- Undiagnosing: patients whose bipolar disorder or schizophrenia turned out to be substance use, and whether psychiatric diagnosis survives once we know much more about each patient
- AI as a new step in care that frees clinicians for the patients who need them
- What Arpan would not want AI to do in mental health
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