AIFoPa-2026-0013
Date of Record: 27 Jul 2026
3 min read
The Scribe Ordered Blood Tests Nobody Requested
Ontario’s Auditor General tested twenty AI medical scribes on scripted consultations. Nine invented treatment the doctor had never proposed.
The Auditor General is the independent officer who audits a province’s spending and programmes. On 12 May 2026 Ontario’s Auditor General, Shelley Spence, released a special report. It examined the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement. The ministry “did not have consistently effective processes and procedures in place” to manage artificial intelligence across the Ontario Public Service.
Among the systems examined were twenty AI scribes. A scribe listens to a clinical consultation and generates the doctor’s note from it.
Evaluators ran a pair of scripted conversations between hypothetical doctors and hypothetical patients through each of the twenty systems.
Nine of the twenty hallucinated. They fabricated information, or added to the patient’s treatment plan proposals the doctor had never made. Among the additions were a referral for therapy and an order for blood tests.
Twelve of the twenty recorded a different drug from the one the doctor had prescribed. Seventeen omitted key mental-health details in at least one of the two tests. Six omitted them in both.
Every vendor examined showed an accuracy or completeness failure in at least one test. There were no clean results.
The character of these failures matters more than their frequency. A note that omits a symptom is incomplete, and incompleteness is a familiar hazard of clinical record-keeping.
A note containing a referral the physician did not make, or a drug the physician did not prescribe, is not incomplete. It is a record of a consultation that did not take place, filed in the chart of a patient who did attend one.
Stephen Crawford is Minister of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement. He emphasised that the hallucinations had occurred during testing and training, rather than during medical appointments.
The Bureau accepts the distinction as stated. Testing is the stage at which a system’s behaviour is characterised rather than altered. The characterisation obtained here was that nine of twenty systems invent treatment.