AI may appear in healthcare in different ways: imaging triage, risk scoring, clinical decision support, lab interpretation support, or automated drafting of clinician notes. The key issue isn’t whether a computer existed—it’s whether the care team treated automated outputs as reliable when they should have verified them.
In a Scranton setting, diagnostic errors can show up in practical places residents recognize:
- Urgent care and walk-in clinics where patients are triaged quickly and follow-up is easy to miss.
- Hospital systems where results move through multiple hands—radiology, lab, nursing, provider review—before decisions are made.
- Telehealth or after-hours intake where symptoms are summarized briefly and nuance is lost.
If an AI tool helped shape the diagnosis (or the documentation of the diagnosis), that can matter—especially when the record shows the team had contrary information, abnormal findings, or red flags that weren’t escalated.


