Don’t Be Afraid of AI in Your Practice

AI is transforming health IT, but chiropractic adoption remains low. This discussion covers its benefits, risks, and key safeguards like HIPAA compliance and content verification. Watch the video to learn more!

Transcript:

I went to a health IT conference a couple of years ago, and as I walked through the trade show, what was amazing to me, and now looking back on it, not quite as amazing, was how many different vendors, how many different EHR companies, how many different software engineer companies were out there that were really focused and honed in on AI. In fact, I had a friend of mine text me while I was there, jokingly and sarcastically asking me how many vendors were talking about AI, or how much of the conference was AI related and it was sarcasm, because of how much we have seen a boom with AI over the last several years.

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What is interesting, though, is we still have a very low adoption rate and usage rate in the chiropractic profession for AI. So I wanted to go over a couple of things, because I think it’s really important to understand, and also just give a couple of cautions nothing that would prohibit you from using it in really good ways. In fact, I’m a huge fan of AI, and right now, even the current versions that we see more readily available in the generative AI and things along those lines. So first of all is this, don’t be afraid of AI, right? Don’t be scared of it, just be aware. So you can use it and just be aware, but whatever you do, don’t be afraid of it, because, quite candidly, it’s not a fad. This isn’t something short-lived. We’re not going to see it go away. I do think we’re going to see an incredible evolution of AI over the next several years and even over the next several decades, as we continue to to work through this. I think you know, we can look back and some of our lives and see some of the progression of changes, you know, from the internet to social media to AI and everything in between, and some of these large leaps that happened over time. And so know that it’s not going away, and you need to be aware of that.

Now, in your practice, what are some cautions that I would give you? Well, the biggest one that I would give you now is because of how these models work when you feed them information, they’re taking the information, they’re analyzing it, and most of the time, they’re going to use that information again for further analysis and for other uses and for training moving forward. So when you feed it patient information, you’re giving the universe that patient information. So HIPAA has to be considered. if you’re going to use patient-specific information, you’ve got to make sure that you are using AI that is HIPAA compliant. You want to make sure that you have nailed that down and you have verified that with those specific AI companies when you’re feeding it specific patient information or patient identifying information. So be cautious if you’re thinking about using it for, you know, your conversations or the subjective analysis of your documentation with the patient. You want to make sure that, ultimately, you’re using HIPAA-compliant AI in those cases, right? Because you’re feeding it specific patient information.

Second, this is when you begin to use it. You want to make sure that you update your notice of privacy policies you want to have your references to what may have changed in your practice. And by the way, this happens for everything it related, right? If you make a change in your practice or even not, it is related, right, if you’ve made a modification in your policies or your procedures and how you handle patient information, whether it be paper or software-driven, or you change EHRs and things along those lines, you want to make sure that you update your notice of privacy policies. That is not a document that should just sit on your shelf. That’s one you want to make sure is iron-clad and is up to date on a regular basis. You should be reviewing that no less than once a year. If it’s been sitting on your shelf since 2004 it’s probably time to blow off the dust and get back to it. By the way, we can help you guide you through some of that process. If you jump out and use Statusfi go to mystatusfidashboard.com, my.statusfidashboard.com and it’ll help walk you through all things HIPAA, and by the way, that software is free for ICS members.

But back to AI, super important, where can you use it? Well, there’s a lot of places, by the way, that you can use it, but let me just give you a couple of starting off spots. Starting off spots would be in your marketing or your advertising. It can help you write blogs, but when you do, when you use that to help you write blogs, or help you write anything, always verify, because it’s a universe of information, and there is misinformation out there that it could be trained on. You want to make sure that that it’s not hallucinating, right? It’s not making something up, or it’s not misinterpreting something and other data. But I will tell you, it can help you speed up your authoring of your blogs that you may have for your website and help jump-start you down the road. Now, the more information you can provide, in your prompt, or when you ask it to help you, the better. So if you know exactly what you want to write or the information you want to include, include that information and make sure that it tailors it specifically for what you want for your practice. Again, be cautious of adding any specific patient information or information that could be utilized to identify just like you would any other marketing material. Be careful, as we talked about before. It can also help you write social media blurbs. So if you know exactly, for example, let’s say it helps you write this blog and you finally and you’ve edited it and you’re ready to post it, but you want to drop it on your social media, and you want something to summarize, you can have it actually summarize that blog that you’ve just polished and verified and give you a short way to actually drop it on all of your social media accounts, whatever they may be. It can also help you write marketing materials. So if you’re putting together a flyer for your practice or something along those lines, you can ask it to help you write some of the blurbs on that particular flyer to better communicate. And you can even tell it who your audience is, right? That’s super important. Tell it who your audience is, and it will craft a message more specifically for the audience that you provide it.

So what are some of the tools that you can use that you can jump in and help you kind of get over some of your fears? Of course, the most popular out there right now, in the generative AI world, or the large language model world, is chat GPT, and it is incredibly robust. It does a lot of work if you’ve got data that isn’t patient-specific, it can provide you graphs and analyze spreadsheets, and do all kinds of different work for you. But chatGPT is a great place to start, and kind of dip your toes into the water, if you will. Fathom.ai is another one that a lot of people use for meetings, and it will actually shape some of the meetings. Otter does something very similar. Otter.ai, does something similar, where, if you’re having staff meetings and you’re not talking about specific patient information, again, right? But you want a quick summary that you can give to your entire staff after a staff meeting or staff huddle. In those cases, you can use AI to help you summarize that and remind people what their to-dos are, so you can actually move them over to the to-done column, right? So you can use AI to help you with your staff meetings and your in-house efforts that you make from an employment standpoint or from a team standpoint if you will.

Another one is if you do video work, you can use Opus clips. And now, what Opus clips will do is take a longer video mesh, like this one here, and craft it into something you could post as a reel on Facebook or Instagram or a YouTube short, or even Tiktok. It’ll break it down into shorter segments, and it uses AI to determine what it believes is going to be the most popular, the most potentially impactful information that you’re providing inside of a particular video, and break it down into that portrait style work, and also then prep it. You can select what you want there to drop into those different mediums. So anyway, the biggest thing is, don’t be fearful. It’s not just a fad. It’s here to stay, and you can find ways to adopt its use in your practice. Hopefully, this helps you out, and we’ll catch you next week.