I was excited to take this online live webinar today entitled” Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare Professionals.” It fulfilled by physical therapy license renewal requirements and I wanted to learn if it could positively affect my ability to treat patients and expand my healthcare business.

One of the first things that the instructor told us was to avoid putting any personal information (social security, driver’s license and passport information) in AI LLMs (modes). He also stressed that the health professional should not rely solely on AI to make medical decisions. AI is based on statistics and humans are needed to analyze the information it provides. A study in Poland found that those physicians who heavily relied on AI had lost some of their medical skills. AI uses many sources for its information including Facebook, Reddit and outdated Wikipedia websites which are not always reliable. AI has missed rare diseases, confused drugs and misinterpreted lab results so it is important for the health professional to verify it’s information.

Medicare has plans to use AI to decide which medical tests they will pay for based on the patient’s chart information. Patient’s may be denied services even when their own doctors feel these tests are warranted. The physicians’ ability to use their own expertise to diagnosis and treat patients will be affected. AI should expand human insight, not override it. This is the reason that guard rails are needed to protect the public.

The instructor recommended that when searching AI, health professionals should be direct, limit our scope and avoid overloading it with information. Pharmacists can use AI to find dosing errors, drug interactions, help with inventory and for virtual counseling. Dentists can use it for dental image analysis and for voice assistant note taking. Mental health professionals can use it for transcript analysis and creating home exercises. They need to be very careful to avoid using AI trained robots for counseling sessions since AI lacks empathy and the ability to make ethical decisions. Physical therapists, like myself, can use it for posture correction, creating treatment plan,goals and to identify pain patterns. Dieticians can use it for meal planning and patient education.

I look forward to using AI to improve the quality of care my patients receive by providing them with the newest and most effective physical therapy exercises and nutrition supplements. AI can also help me write blog posts, but I promise you that I wrote this post all by myself!