How One Physician Uses Generative AI in Their Personal Life
Physicians lose 30% of their time to administrative work, which means they spend less time practicing medicine. Generative AI promises to solve this, but we’ve all heard stories of hallucinations and AI lawsuits. As the saying goes, you never want to practice with live ammo, so what is a physician to do? We will walk through how one physician uses generative AI in her personal life to learn how to use it in her professional one.
Getting Familiar with Generative AI Before Introduction into a Clinical Setting
Physicians may be the occupation that is least at risk from generative AI, but only 11% use it for clinical care. In our Definitive Guide to Generative AI, we covered everything to know about generative AI. Many physicians reached out to us asking, in so many words, how they could test out generative AI without connecting patient data? Many physicians mentioned ChatGPT being blocked on their intranet and others (rightfully) talked about not wanting to paste in data.
One of the best ways we’ve solved this problem at Health Universe? Using AI in our personal lives. With that in mind, we asked our resident physician, Dr. Sarah Gebauer, to tell us how she uses AI Agents/GPTs in her personal life.
A Quick Primer on AI Agents
The next 12 months will be dominated by AI Agents, also known as GPTs. Think of them like apps in the AI era. Each GPT will have different areas of expertise. They will have prompts and context already loaded into them, so you don’t need to do it. If you’ve ever used ChatGPT and had to enter “Imagine you are a doctor…” over and over, you know what a pain it can be. Not only is it a pain, but it drives up costs for everyone because each search costs pennies, which add up quickly. Right now everyone uses ChatGPT, but soon we will also use custom agents or GPTs designed for specific purposes.
Bridging the Personal and Professional Use of Generative AI
The best way to get familiar with generative AI prior to introducing it to your clinical setting is through using it in your personal life. There are three major reasons:
Improving Your Skill with Generative AI
For those of us old enough to remember, learning to use ChatGPT is like learning to use Google. You need to learn to speak its language to get the right results. It’s fancily called Prompt Engineering. In 5 years it will be a skill everyone has, but in the meantime, prompt engineering is a skillset everyone needs to develop.
Dogfooding/Finding the Flaws
“Dogfooding” is a techie phrase that refers to trialing your own product before releasing it. It’s a reference to the idea that dog food makers should eat their own dog food before selling it. ChatGPT isn’t great with everything. Finding where it lets you down and where it adds value is crucial for your success. Using your personal life as a guinea pig is a low-stakes way to identify those flaws.
Making the Case for Generative AI to Health System Executives
In a past life, I helped doctors fill appointments through text messages. A major talking point doctors used to sell my software to their executives was the following: “I text all the time with my XYZ, why can’t I do it with my patients?”. In the near future, the pitch will be, “I use AI all the time to plan my trips, why can’t I use it for my patients?”
How a Physician Uses Generative AI in Their Personal Life
Family
- Create weekly meal plans and grocery lists
- Find the most fun activities for kids in any random city in the world
- Figure out how to do household projects
Clinical
- Maximize efficiency for scheduling patients
- Develop a monthly call schedule given vacation constraints
- Review AI-assisted clinical decision support
Research
- Review references and summarize existing literature
- Write a first draft from outline form
- Edit and reformat into different submission types
- Critique drafts
Business
- Use AI-powered calendars to group my meetings efficiently
- Use AI voice summarization tools like Otter AI to summarize my meetings and find facts after the meeting is done
- Create images for flyers and promotional materials
Conclusion
Practice like you play. However, with real patient data, this is not a possibility. One approach is for clinicians to use generative AI in their personal life as a testing ground before trying to implement it within the health system. Not only will it help improve your skills, but it will also make your personal life easier! We’ve provided multiple ways a physician uses generative AI to make her chaotic life slightly more manageable; hopefully, this helps you find your way into it as well.
