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Clinical Practice & Patient Safety

6 articles

When the Chart Writes Itself: Rethinking AI Documentation as a Gateway to More Human Clinical Encounters

When the Chart Writes Itself: Rethinking AI Documentation as a Gateway to More Human Clinical Encounters

Ambient AI documentation tools are rapidly entering American clinical environments with a compelling promise: free clinicians from administrative burden and return meaningful time to the patient encounter. But as early implementations reveal, the difference between technology that enhances care and technology that quietly disrupts it often comes down to how these systems are designed, deployed, and governed.

Giving Up Too Soon: How Therapeutic Nihilism Quietly Fails the Patients Who Need Us Most

Giving Up Too Soon: How Therapeutic Nihilism Quietly Fails the Patients Who Need Us Most

Therapeutic nihilism—the quiet conviction that further intervention is futile—represents one of the most underexamined threats to patient safety in modern clinical practice. Often rooted in provider burnout, implicit bias, or outdated training, this mindset leads to premature withdrawal of evidence-based care. AAPTS examines how to recognize this pattern and what institutions can do to reverse it.

What Medical Schools Are Not Teaching: The Communication Crisis Quietly Undermining Patient Outcomes

What Medical Schools Are Not Teaching: The Communication Crisis Quietly Undermining Patient Outcomes

Decades of rigorous investment in clinical science have produced extraordinary diagnostic and therapeutic tools, yet medical education continues to treat patient communication as an afterthought. Evidence consistently links structured communication training to reductions in adverse events, malpractice claims, and patient harm—raising urgent questions about why residency programs and continuing medical education still relegate these skills to the margins.

Ordering More Is Not Caring More: Confronting the Hidden Harms of Diagnostic Overreach

Ordering More Is Not Caring More: Confronting the Hidden Harms of Diagnostic Overreach

Diagnostic uncertainty has quietly become one of the most consequential drivers of unnecessary testing, patient harm, and unsustainable healthcare expenditure in the United States. Evidence-based frameworks and clinical decision support tools offer a path forward, but lasting change requires a cultural shift that AAPTS members are uniquely positioned to lead. This article examines why more testing does not equal better medicine—and what clinicians can do differently.

Clinician Exhaustion Is a Patient Safety Crisis: The Case for Systemic Wellness Strategies

Clinician Exhaustion Is a Patient Safety Crisis: The Case for Systemic Wellness Strategies

Physician burnout has moved well beyond an individual wellness concern—it now represents a measurable threat to diagnostic accuracy, treatment quality, and patient safety outcomes across US healthcare systems. Mounting evidence links chronic clinician exhaustion to increased medical errors, elevated patient mortality risk, and accelerating workforce attrition. AAPTS examines the science behind this crisis and the institutional interventions that can meaningfully reverse its trajectory.

When Waiting Costs More Than a Diagnosis: The Financial and Human Toll of Delayed Clinical Decisions

When Waiting Costs More Than a Diagnosis: The Financial and Human Toll of Delayed Clinical Decisions

Diagnostic delays remain one of the most preventable sources of patient harm and unnecessary healthcare expenditure in the United States. New data and frontline clinician perspectives reveal how standardized, evidence-based diagnostic pathways are transforming outcomes—and the bottom line—for practices willing to act. AAPTS examines what the science says and what your practice can do today.