Practice tip of the week: Implementing AI
Your weekly dose of wisdom from the Physicians Practice experts.
With all the useful information available on Physicians Practice, it is easy to become overwhelmed.
With this in mind, the tip of the week is a chance to reflect on some of the wisdom found all across the site. In this December 2024 article on implementing AI in your practice, Ronen Lavi, gives this tip:
Step 2: Choose tech that is well suited to meet your objective
Because primary care has very different technological needs from other fields (and even from other areas of health care), it’s important to choose an AI-powered solution that meets those needs. Clinical tools built exclusively on generic large language models will not be able to address complex clinical use cases adequately. To get the required accuracy and precision for a clinical setting, health care organizations need health care-specific AI tools, which can either be homegrown from the ground up or undergo significant fine-tuning.
When considering an AI solution, it’s also important to look into the vendor and make sure you’re a good match. Pay attention to the vendor’s track record, references, how long it will take to deploy the technology fully, and how disruptive its rollout will be to your organization. And you’ll want to find out whether medical professionals played a central role in designing the product, applying their real-world experience to make sure it meets the day-to-day needs of primary care providers.
In addition, you should think about the degree to which a given vendor is willing to work with you rather than just offering an out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all solution. This could include working with your organization to design an AI solution that meets your particular needs, offering comprehensive customer support, and helping train your organization’s clinicians and other team members to use this technology.
As you shop around for an AI-powered tool, it’s worth getting input from your clinicians. By letting them participate in choosing the technology that they’ll use, you can get valuable insight into what it takes for a solution to help them concretely. Involving them in this process can also help you encourage them to use the technology once it’s deployed.
Click here to read the rest of the article and be sure to check back next week for another Tip of the Week!
