Dr. Ast, chief medical innovation officer at Hospital for Special Surgery, joined the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” to discuss successful AI strategies.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: As it relates to your practice with HSS, are there any specific areas within AI that you’re particularly excited about? Are there any early initiatives that you’re focusing on? Any early results you can share?
Dr. Michael Ast: One very simple example that was talked about by many of my colleagues and I is just making basic tasks easier. Every single professional out there has to get their resume or their CV in place, and it’s just a task you do every once in a while. We’ve been hoping AI will make tedious tasks easier. We launched internally a way that AI is going to help us do all of that. It searches the internet, brings up all our recent publications, anywhere we’re mentioned in the news, anywhere that we have given lectures and structures it for us and puts it all together. We can review it and probably save me 10 to 12 hours of work just when it’s time to apply for another promotion or send my CV somewhere.
Another we’re most excited about right now is the development of our AI-powered postoperative chatbot. When our patients call us with very basic questions like “When can I shower? When can I do this? When should I make my appointment?” as opposed to having a person calling back, with generative AI we’ve been able to create a tool that patients can interact with that has seen incredible success in our early pilot data. It responds right away with the information that we gave it, and it responds in any language that you can speak. It gives a huge advantage over someone like me who doesn’t speak French or Japanese, or any language that a patient might want.
Another development that is the most exciting are ambient listening devices to help us write our notes and get things done and make our offices more efficient. It brings us up to being able to get back to having face-to-face conversations with patients without having to worry about writing my notes. Having ambient listening devices in all of the rooms is something that HSS has actually made a pretty significant investment with, thanks to a very generous donation from a grateful patient.
The last thing is that the future where we all want to see this go in surgery is, how to make surgery better. How can we make surgery more predictable? The combination of advanced surgical tools like computer navigation and robotics is a big topic right now. By combining that with machine learning algorithms and AI and large data sets, we can start to help develop decision support tools that are really going to help us bring personalized patient surgery that hopefully will give us improved patient outcomes in the future.
