Artificial intelligence has arrived in medicine with considerable fanfare, and the debate over its role tends to cluster around two poles: enthusiastic adoption and existential alarm. Physicians on the front lines, however, tend to occupy more complicated ground. For Dr. Elizabeth Garchar, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist and perinatologist, the most compelling case for AI in healthcare has less to do with diagnostic breakthroughs than with something far more mundane and far more consequential: paperwork.
Dr. Garchar is candid about where she sees immediate, practical value. She describes being excited about the possibility of AI helping to streamline charting and making billing "less of a nightmare by double checking my work and really making me focus on the medicine by doing all the paperwork it possibly can." In her telling, the administrative burden on physicians is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural problem that erodes the quality of care and, over time, erodes the physicians delivering it. Streamlining routine documentation, she argues, could "massively decrease burn out among physicians."
That framing matters. Physician burnout has reached levels that public health researchers now treat as a crisis in its own right, with measurable effects on patient outcomes, workforce retention, and access to care. The promise of AI as an administrative relief valve, rather than a clinical oracle, is one that resonates across specialties. For a high-stakes field like maternal-fetal medicine, where cognitive load and emotional weight are constants, the idea of reclaiming mental bandwidth from billing codes and chart notes carries real weight.
But Dr. Garchar is equally clear about where she thinks the technology poses a genuine risk. Her concern centers on a kind of intellectual atrophy, the possibility that relying too heavily on AI could erode the reasoning skills that make good medicine possible. She worries about using AI "too sweepingly to replace the thought that goes into medicine," even as she acknowledges the value of using it to help apply in-place protocols. The distinction she draws is between AI as a tool that supports clinical thinking and AI as a substitute for it. Physicians, she argues, need to keep doing their research and applying their clinical reasoning. "It is really important to keep our creativity as we practice medicine and not just do things automatically because its what we did last time."
That word, creativity, is worth pausing on. It does not often appear in policy discussions about AI and healthcare, which tend to focus on accuracy rates, liability frameworks, and workflow integration. But medicine, especially in a specialty that deals with complex, high-risk pregnancies, often requires physicians to hold protocols loosely and think through what a given patient actually needs. The concern is that an AI-assisted environment, if implemented without care, could quietly reward pattern-matching over genuine reasoning, and that physicians trained in such an environment might not even notice what they are losing.
The broader conversation about AI in medicine tends to be driven by technologists, hospital administrators, and policy makers. Dr. Garchar's perspective is a reminder that the physicians in the room with patients bring a different set of priorities. The goal, as she frames it, is not to resist the technology but to use it in ways that preserve what makes medicine worth practicing in the first place.