Dr. Alice Gilson speaks on AI in documentation at Swiss College of Surgeons Congress in Lausanne

At the SCS Congress in Lausanne, Dr. Alice Gilson from the Department of Visceral Surgery at HUG in Geneva addressed the growing administrative burden in medicine and the role artificial intelligence could play in transforming medical documentation.

Citing recent Swiss data, she highlighted that physicians spend up to five hours per day on administrative tasks. She identified key causes: poorly designed EHR systems, increasing regulatory requirements, medico-legal traceability and complex clinical coding obligations.

While early studies show that AI-powered documentation tools can reduce note-writing time by around 20% and improve quality, Dr. Gilson stressed the associated risks, including hallucinations, clinical responsibility and data protection concerns under Swiss and EU law.

She concluded by presenting DocNote, a Swiss-developed solution designed to generate anonymised consultation reports while ensuring strict local data storage and automatic deletion of recordings, aiming to reduce administrative workload without compromising confidentiality.