Similar to the discovery of antibiotics, artificial intelligence is becoming a game-changer in healthcare and spine surgery, Craig McMains, MD, said.
“This is modern medicine’s inflection point,” Dr. McMains, of Indianapolis-based OrthoIndy, said on an episode of “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast.” “AI here is going to completely change the paradigm of how we approach healthcare because our ability to diagnose is going to be enhanced by it. Our ability to then from a surgical perspective, pre-operatively plan will be changed. Right now we’re leveraging our imaging platform and we’re learning how to integrate an AI to give us automated preoperative measurements.”
Beyond the surgical applications, Dr. McMains said AI can also be leveraged to strengthen the physician-patient connection.
“I can type and write pretty fast, but my scribe could always do it faster than me, so they were always in the clinic with me typing up my notes,” he said. “Now I use an AI scribing platform, and the quality is surprisingly good, and it’s getting better … Utilize it because that means you spend more time with your patient and get to talk to them more, versus taking notes and doing documentation.”
While it takes time to learn AI tools, Dr. McMains said physicians should take advantage of them sooner than later.
“We’re very dogmatic, and we’re very entrenched in our ways,” he said. “We like to make sure that everything is evidence based. We are resistant to sudden change for change’s sake … But AI and to a degree biologics, because they’re kind of feeding into each other are things that are rapidly evolving, and if we don’t have a willingness to embrace some of these newer methods of interacting with patients and improving patient care, it’s going to be a detriment to our our our product as surgeons and physicians.”
