MAY 23, 2025
Paul J. Barr, MSc, PhD
Associate Professor
The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice and
Biomedical Data Science
Dartmouth College
About the Presentation: With advances in generative AI, the ambient recording of clinic visits is emerging and will quickly become commonplace in healthcare over the next five years. In this talk, Dr. Barr will discuss the benefits of sharing visit recordings and provide examples of AI-powered applications using ambient recording to support clinicians, patients, and health systems. While optimistic about the potential benefits, Dr. Barr will also address the foreseeable ethical challenges related to ambient recording and argue that patients, their care partners, and clinicians must remain central to development, implementation, and oversight.
About the Presenter: Dr. Barr is an Associate Professor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, Biomedical Data Science, and a member of the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, Geisel School of Medicine. He is trained in quantitative and qualitative methods with substantial funding from NIA and PCORI. His research portfolio includes the development and implementation of measures of shared decision making (SDM), the user-centered design and evaluation of patient-facing interventions to support SDM in individuals with depression, and the communication of medical information to older adult patients and their care partners to optimize self-management.
In 2015, Dr. Barr formed the OpenRecordings group, a multidisciplinary group of researchers, clinicians, and patients to evaluate the clinical utility and applications of audio/video recordings of healthcare visits. He developed novel software, HealthPAL, a comprehensive audio/video personal health library that supports sharing clinic visit recordings with patients and applies natural language processing to automatically identify key information in the visit. His group leads several large clinical trials of visit recording in older adults across the United States and has published its work in high-impact journals, including the NEJM AI, BMJ, and JAMA.