April 2025 Pick of the Month

Braver Than Ever

“The work by Kareemi et al, Artificial intelligence–based clinical decision support in the emergency department: A scoping review is a valuable contribution to the field of emergency medicine and AI research, offering a detailed overview of the current landscape of AI-CDS tools. ​However, its focus on preclinical studies and lack of performance or quality assessments limits its ability to provide actionable insights into clinical implementation. ​The recommendations for adhering to reporting guidelines and addressing the "AI chasm" are important, but future research should focus on evaluating tool efficacy, understanding barriers to implementation, and expanding the scope to include administrative applications. ​Overall, the review is a strong foundation for further exploration of AI in emergency medicine.“

BOOOORING!!

Yes, that is Chat GPT’s analysis of this paper. Pretty dry but certainly easy. This human chose Kareemi et al’s work as the POTM because it represents a valuable summary of the “where we are” with artificial intelligence (AI) in emergency care and decision support. A few themes emerge, including the rapid increase in AI-related publications (Figure 2), and that the majority of decision support models were supervised (meaning humans helped), and most focused on prognosis and diagnoses (Figure 3). Of note, this scoping review could have been classified as a systematic review, because of its rigorous search methods. This review is focused only on decision support and does not cover applications such as AI assisted medical record generation or billing or image interpretation. Those applications exist commercially and are in use in a few EDs already with much more to come. It’s a new world for sure. Whether be a brave one or not, remains to be seen.

Jeffrey A. Kline, MD
Wayne State University School of Medicine
Editor-in-Chief