Currently, most healthcare data is extremely lossy. When a patient talks to a doctor, the doctor then filters what they think is important and puts it in the record. That's even further filtered for things like claims, billing, etc.
With ambient dictation we are moving to a world with much lower loss rates because the raw encounter data with the patient is captured.
My theory is that the ambient dictation companies will be able to find disease trends way before research. Right now there's an enormous lag (decades) between docs noticing a trend among patients > research getting done to prove it > it becoming normalized in clinical practice.
Ambient dictation creates a brain that lives across physicians - if one patient says that they're getting intense migraines, it's tough for a doc to know if it's from the new drug or if the patient is just stressed. But if a dictation company hears 100 patients in the same time span talk about it with their doctor, they can surface to the doctor that other people are hearing this.
I think this will shorten the time between anecdotes and changes to practice considerably because it will surface trends much faster