Best Practices for Patient Centered Communication and Documentation: AI Tools and Clinical Guidance
June 23rd, 2026
The 21st Century Cures Act now gives patients unrestricted access to their clinical notes—and patients are reading. Yet stigmatizing language in documentation can undermine trust, engagement, and outcomes while reinforcing clinician bias. This talk presents Stanford's enterprise-wide response. Drawing on an original investigation of high-utilization Epic templates—where roughly 7% contained outdated language driving over 23,000 notes—it introduces the Stanford Best Practices for Communication alongside a piloted Epic-based AI text-assist tool that surfaces patient-centered alternatives at the point of care, positioning Stanford to set a national standard for compassionate, equitable documentation.
Natasha Steele, MD, MPH
Dr. Natasha Steele is a hospitalist and clinician-researcher at Stanford Health Care, where she practices in the Division of Hospital Medicine and works at the intersection of clinical care, health equity, and applied AI. Her research focuses on AI-assisted clinical tools, patient-centered documentation, and the structural barriers that shape how underserved patients appear in the digital health record. Her broader work spans clinical quality improvement, documentation reform grounded in the 21st Century Cures Act, and patient engagement initiatives that connect clinicians with the patients they serve.
