Health systems are responding with competing approaches. Stanford Health Care has deployed physician-facing AI to draft plain-language summaries of lab results for clinician review before transmission to patients. Quest Diagnostics launched an AI Companion within its patient portal to summarize test results and flag trends, though the tool explicitly disclaims diagnostic or treatment functions and operates only on recent results with patient consent. The split reflects institutional caution: systems are experimenting with AI as a drafting aid for clinicians while patients independently use consumer tools for first-line interpretation.
The underlying driver is a post-2021 legal shift that mandated near-immediate patient access to test results, imaging, and clinical notes—often before physicians could explain findings. That access created demand for translation into plain language but also opened space for AI hallucinations, misreadings, and anxiety-inducing false positives. Attorneys should monitor how this collision between patient access rights, consumer AI adoption, and medical liability plays out. Clinicians are now spending appointment time untangling incorrect AI guidance, and the question of who bears responsibility for patient harm caused by AI misinterpretation remains unsettled.