AI in orthopedics holds lots of potential to break down silos in practices and health systems, Travis Doering, MD, said.
Dr. Doering, an orthopedic surgeon opening his own practice, is leveraging local AI over cloud-based tools. The hardware comes at an upfront cost but has advantages in dat security and lower constraints.
He discussed the way he thinks about expenses on an upcoming episode of “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedics Podcast.”
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: How should practice leaders think about the costs of localizing AI tools? Is it similar to considering expensive robotic and navigation tools?
Dr. Travis Doering: There’s a few ways to look at it, and a few ways to model it because although hardware right now is expensive, if you’re comparing the output to a well-configured, well-out footed local AI solution, you should probably be comparing that to the salaries of the staff that they either are going to be augmenting or replacing. For example if you have an AI receptionist that is able to triage calls, put in medication refills, kind of doing all that stuff, such that you need one or two less MAs. There’s also the synergy that you get from being able to link different aspects of your practice, of your clinic or of your hospital together. Behind the scenes, now your front desk is talking to billing is talking to scheduling is talking to everybody. If a rejected claim comes in from an insurance company, AI automatically, behind the scenes, is able to process it and feed it into a self-learning, self-evolving claim submission tool. Nothing is nothing in medicine lives in a silo. Patients’ data has to go from department to department, and if you’re able to streamline and get rid of some of those silos then not only do I think that you should be evaluating AI on its per user cost but also some of the synergies that can allow your practice to just be that much more efficient.
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