Harvard Med Student Wants AI To Handle The Typing. So Doctors Can Talk To Humans. Radical, I Know.
A Harvard Medical School student wrote in the Boston Globe that medical education should deploy AI to reduce clerical burden and reclaim time for patient care. The student describes spending hours typing disease progression details into electronic medical records, combing through old charts, scans, and lab results. The argument insists students must still learn diagnosis independently of AI, including conditions like heart disease, pneumonia, and diabetes, to develop clinical reasoning and critical thinking.
The underlying principle here is task triage between human and machine. The mechanism is cognitive load reallocation. AI absorbs the repetitive, pattern-matching labor, in this case chart review and documentation, so the human cognitive budget shifts to tasks machines cannot perform: empathy, contextual judgment, and relational care. The lesson transfers beyond medicine. Identify which parts of your work are mechanical and delegate them. Protect the parts that require judgment.
A Harvard Medical School student authored the opinion piece in the Boston Globe on September 19, 2026. The student cites surveys showing educational impacts and draws from direct clinical experience interviewing patients and managing records.
- Pick one repetitive clerical task you do regularly, such as organizing notes from a meeting or summarizing a long document. Paste the raw material into an AI assistant and ask for a structured summary. Expected outcome: you recover time you would have spent on mechanical processing.
- Take the saved time and spend it on something that requires human judgment or relational attention. Call a colleague. Think strategically. Have a real conversation. Expected outcome: you experience the cognitive load reallocation the Harvard student describes.
- Repeat this pattern daily for one week and track which tasks you delegated versus which you kept. Expected outcome: you develop an intuition for the human-machine task boundary that the opinion piece argues is central to the future of professional work.