& i mean, it's not as though medical records were better from a patient perspective prior to computing either. like, historically this is a genre that existed primarily for educational purposes, nobody was really trying to establish continuity of care or whatever. if you were rich maybe you had the town doctor for your whole life, if you were poor you probably weren't even seeing a doctor until you got sick enough they institutionalised you to die, & with the advent of travelling surgeon types the line between treating the patient & experimentation was almost nonexistant -- the point of records broadly wasn't that the patient had their own dossier, it was to talk shop with other physicians. maybe within certain institutions you see records that eg a senior physician would keep to communicate with his underlings but they pretty much just depended on what that guy thought was important or what tasks he wanted done, it still wasn't some detailed accurate reporting of patient care. sometimes it was like 1 line in diary form, those guys did not care they were just doing whatever. later standardising the genre largely followed from 1/ increased need for medical records in court proceedings 2/ increased need for medical records in medical billing & social insurance systems 3/ punch card and other automated record-keeping systems, which themselves became more necessary and fashionable due to factors 1 and 2. and like this is all bad! it sucks. and i get being annoyed that the ai transcription makes mistakes or whatever. but even leaving aside the obvious issue that the human doctor makes those mistakes too, it's just like... we've had this genre before what's marketed as ai even existed. & those iterations also sucked ass