AI summaries lighten the load for cancer clinicians before first visits
Before a first oncology appointment, clinicians often dig through piles of unstructured documents. Researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, working with partners including kaiko.ai, tested an AI tool built with large language models that prepares structured summaries for these first consultations. In a small real world study published in npj Digital Medicine, nine clinicians used it across 33 consultations. Their perceived workload dropped by about 29 percent compared with baseline, and they reported saving a little over three minutes per case on average. Preparation succeeded in most consultations. The authors call the findings exploratory and say more research is needed, but it is an encouraging look at AI giving doctors time back.