[INTRODUCTION]
Announcer
At Freedom Healthworks, we are focused on putting medical professionals back in control of their practices, utilizing a structured, tailored approach to business startup and operations. It could make sense for you to work with our professional team to avoid expensive pitfalls, and more importantly, expedite your journey to success. As we all know, time is money. If you're involved in the practice of medicine and desire to practice free of headaches and constraints, reach out for a no obligation, consultative conversation, call us today at 317-804-1203 or visit freedomhealthworks.com.
[EPISODE]
Christopher Habig
Welcome to Healthcare Americana, the podcast that brings you the latest in healthcare innovations, direct care insights and the movers and shakers of the medical world. I'm your host, Christopher Habig, the CEO of Freedom Healthworks. Today, we're delving into the topic at the forefront of healthcare evolution. The role, I feel like we should have a drum roll there, but the role of artificial intelligence or AI in transforming patient care and de-burdening physicians and providers.
Christopher Habig
With us is our special guest, Dr. Ronald Razmi, Managing Director of Zoi Capital and author of a brand new book, AI Doctor, The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare. He's a leading figure in the integration of AI within healthcare settings. Dr. Razmi, it's a pleasure to have you with us today.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
Thank you, Chris. It's great to be with you and enjoy listening to the show and now being a part of it.
Christopher Habig
I always appreciate that. You know, just we do read fan mail. So everybody out there, I always encourage you to reach out to us. And you could end up on the show if you have something fun to talk about here. So to get started here, Dr. Razmi, I think during our introduction, I think more than a few of our listeners heads just exploded when I said the words artificial intelligence and I said that vaunted AI in healthcare settings. Give us a broad overview of.
Christopher Habig
what that really means when healthcare is being utilized in healthcare, I'm sorry, excuse me, artificial intelligence is being utilized in healthcare and really key areas where it's making a significant impact because I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there right now.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
Yeah, great way to start. And I've been giving a lot of talks in the last few months, including I gave a talk on applications of AI in healthcare at the United Nations annual meeting this past September. No matter what my audience is, I start by defining AI. And I always apologize if people already know, there are people in the audience already know for going too basic. But I think, I think,
There's a mix of understanding of this topic in an audience. And it's good to like bring everybody up to like a common level. And artificial intelligence is really statistical methods that analyze data. That's all it is. So somebody figured out at some point, if you say artificial intelligence, it sounds sexier than statistics.
And therefore, now we use that. It used to be a statistician. Now you're a data scientist and you can get paid more money. So why not use a fancier term and brand yourself better? So I'm all in favor of that and so forth. So it's statistical methods that go through data and figure out what a huge amount of data means. So you say, well, Ron, we've always had analytics. We've always had statistics.
What happened is AI exactly the same thing. It's just rebranded with a cooler term. And I would say not quite. The old statistical methods that we had, the old analytic methods, the business analytic methods that we've had, were well suited for a finite amount of data, a few thousand data points, maybe a million and so forth. And...
They could uncover insights and add data, help with business users and so forth. Historically, statistics and analytics have not had a role in the provision of healthcare. They've had a role in clinical trials and analyzing the results and so forth. And of course, the results from a clinical trial is a few thousand data points. It's not, it's never been billions or trillions. So AI is really
Dr. Ronald Razmi
ability to analyze a humongous amount of data like human genome and human microbiome. There are trillions of bacteria and viruses in our gut and figuring out the relationship between that and the food we eat and our immune system and the relationships to our genes is not an easy task. It's beyond human ability of human brain and beyond the ability of our old analytics and statistics method.
So there are these new methods that have now been created that can analyze the large amounts of data we're dealing with because a lot more data is being generated since the internet was created and everything is being digitized. So that's what AI is. And if you think about healthcare, healthcare is about analyzing your data and figuring out what it means and then doing something about keeping you healthy or managing your disease. Therefore,
what we call it now called AI, is very well suited to improve healthcare.
Christopher Habig
In my mind, I'm always saying like...
I did the old statistics course in college and we're doing a regression analysis. And then that moved on to machine learning. And I just want to highlight that because machine learning was all the rage. I think you mentioned pre show that 10, 15 years ago, it was all about machine learning and putting the inputs and letting computers go ahead and crunch the numbers. And then AI is the next evolution, as I mentioned in the introduction beyond that. So in my mind, it's not just the linear thinking that machine learning can do.
going out there. You hear terms like neural webs and this kind of stuff, but it's able, it's machine learning that's able to connect a lot of disjointed data points, find the relations with them, and then be able to generate insights for the user. Do I have that right? Is that a right way to break that down?
Dr. Ronald Razmi
very eloquently stated and that's exactly what it is, is we cannot, human mind can't look at a billion data points and figure out which mutation is correlated with the disease, but these new supercomputers and GPUs and powered, you know, equipped with these methodologies that are available with AI could now, like you have a superhuman mind now that could
focus on one issue. It still lacks the human cognition and the human ability to understand things in a more general way and know what they mean and ethical implications and weighing the cost of making a mistake. AI can't, AI is programmed to do a task really in a very powerful way, but it can't figure out, oh, if I make a mistake here, the result could be catastrophic. So I'm going to
error on the side of caution. So it still lacks human intelligence, but you can, you can train it to do something extremely well.
Christopher Habig
I think that's a great point to make for listeners out there is that this isn't going to be an artificial intelligence robot physician coming up here and giving you your full diagnostic. This is a way for us to really be better at what we do as human beings and then leave the computers and the machines and the AI to be able to solve a lot of problems that would take us years, if not lifetimes to do by ourselves. And I would say like, you know, machine learning was like, you got to go A, B, C, D with AI.
we're able to get to D by looking at B and then C then M and then Z over here then back to A and then we get to D and it's pulling in all these crazy these crazy insights into it so
With that understanding, and I appreciate you, you know, setting the stage for again, these misconceptions, I think we hear about a lot of AI is going to replace our doctors. And we're like, well, hold on, maybe some you're some way down the road, but that's not today. That's not what is what is happening here. It seems like a good application of AI is a lot in what we hear about population health. It's it's these big numbers. It's these big things. I want to boil
Christopher Habig
focus on at Freedom Healthworks in the direct care setting where we believe very personalized medicine that a fifth of our economies built off the interaction between one patient and one doctor. And that's a very sacred bond between the doctor patient relationship. How does artificial intelligence in the in the evolution of it impact the personalization, the efficiency in healthcare delivery at that very local, very intimate doctor and patient
Dr. Ronald Razmi
Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, the headline that I like to share with everybody is that they're not going to be visited by an AI doctor, like the title of my book. That's a play on words, that your doctor is going to be at the helm and is going to be making the ultimate decision. However, the pilots, you know, in the early planes, they did not have this dashboard and all the automation that happens. The autopilot.
figuring out the angle in which they needed to descend and all of that stuff. Now they have a lot more tools that makes them better pilots, makes our flying experience safer and more pleasant. And there could be a lot more flights because you can train pilots better and all of that good stuff. Same thing here. If your doctors have better tools that help them make better decisions.
That only enhances your experience. So, and if, and we'll get into, you know, some of the clinical applications and some of the non-clinical applications, but I think the way to think about this is AI becomes an assistant for somebody who then can have more digested insights put in front of them so they can pull it all together and then make the decision.
I want to go back to what I mentioned. AI doesn't have the ability to process what is the cost of it making a mistake. Sometimes our analysis of what's in front of us tells us to do certain things, but our consciousness and our different part of our brain says even though all the signs are pointing in one direction, if you're wrong.
and you go there, you know, there could be a pack of wolves waiting for you in those woods and it's better to stay out of it even though AI doesn't have that ability. So it's going to be your doctor that says, even though AI analyze this data and says, chop this patient's arm off because there is a glitch someplace and the data is incomplete and so forth. It's your doctor's sanity that says that makes no sense.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
So AI becomes that system that in most cases will provide good input into better decisions by the doc.
Christopher Habig
It's almost like when we saw during the pandemic, when the government shut everything down, this telehealth popped up big. And it had been around before that. But now, you know, insurance companies and hospitals said, oh, my gosh, we need to be able to do this. And then people all of a sudden latched onto it and saying telehealth is the answer, telemedicine, we can do everything with it. And then now a few years removed from that, we see, well, telehealth was a great supplement to an expert physician and expert provider
that are we headed down the same kind of path, the same kind of I guess pattern with the advent of artificial intelligence and healthcare?
Dr. Ronald Razmi
Not quite because telehealth I think becomes as you mentioned, it's a great choice for certain visits like prescription refills, things that don't require physical examination and basic problems. You can take a picture of your lesion, send it to the doctor and it's going to occupy its own place in the…
in the portfolio of types of interactions you can have to take care of different types of medical problems, like a follow-up and so forth. However, I think AI is going to be infused in every type of interaction, whether it's in-office visit, remote visit, telehealth visit.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
somewhere down the road, you can have AI automating a lot of things, documentation of a visit, coding, placing the orders, placing the prescriptions. Why not automate as much as it is possible? Right? Like when I gave a couple of talks on this topic at Davos at the World Economic Forum, one of them was like you have five minutes to make your case.
for the area that you have expertise in. And I really had to think about it because this is a big topic. And I started off my talk with showing a picture of agriculture from 1850s, which is actually where we are with healthcare delivery today. You started the show by saying one doctor, one patient. That's how agriculture used to be. Like the farmers walked on the fields and...
inspected every crop, you know, with a donkey and so forth. Now they prepare the soil ahead of time. There is drones that monitor the area and things are done proactively. With the help of AI, we can get to that place in healthcare in a few decades where sensors keep an eye on humans and AI analyzes all that data and figures out.
what needs to be done and provides inputs to providers and patients and so forth. We're not anywhere close to that, but with the help of technology, we can start doing population health in a very proactive way, which doesn't happen now. Right now, when you're not feeling well, you make an appointment, you go see a doctor and that doctor decides what's wrong with you and then does testing and so forth. So we're in the 1850s agriculture state right now in healthcare.
Christopher Habig
It's reactive medicine. It's like you've been tuning into a lot of our strategy medicines, strategy sessions at Freedom Healthworks. It's like, how do we flip this mindset in the general population away from reacting when I'm sick, I need to call my doctor into treating the physician like, hey, this is going to be my best friend on speed dial that I'm texting about fancy football, staying out ahead of problems before they happen. And, you know, what I'm hearing you saying, there's a lot of cool tools coming, coming forward that will help us make that shift.
Christopher Habig
in people's brains, we still have to have people being willing to do so and not the old, well, I'm bulletproof, I'm invincible, so I'm never ever going to go see a doctor anyway. So, I'm curious, follow that vein and when you're at Davos talking to some of the most successful people that have ever lived, are people understanding what you're saying? Are they getting it? Is anybody pushing back?
Dr. Ronald Razmi
That's such an amazing question. And I can't, uh, and the fact that you went there immediately, uh, tells me that you have a hunch on what's going on out there because AI was one of the big themes this year at Davos. And there were a lot of very substantive conversations. Like when I go to conferences, a lot of times, uh, the content is so basic. That, you know, I'm not really for there for the content. Even.
When I sit in a session, I'm like, oh my God, this is so basic. However, in Davos, I noticed the content is really good. Like if you're hearing an AI talk, you're hearing cutting-edge experts, like really it's outstanding. Except in healthcare AI, the conversations were so primitive, so basic and like.
People on the panels were saying, I'm looking forward to learning about what this could do. This is panel members, not the audience members. So applications of AI in healthcare are a laggard, just like technology is all, technology adoption in healthcare has always been a laggard. AI is even proving to be more difficult because AI needs data and state of data in healthcare. It's so chaotic.
So there are not a lot of people and there are not a lot of providers that have seen anything about AI yet, like in how it affects their daily practice or how it impacts their jobs, their decision making, the health of their patients and so forth. We're in the early stages with all of this. It's critical to understand that.
Christopher Habig
Is it is it and I had a feeling you were going to say that. But I just wanted to be sure, right. I don't want to assume anything these days. So is the is the lack of adoption in a healthcare setting? Is that is it a privacy thing? Is it people don't know how to use it? Is it completely that the data is an absolute mess because EMRs are won't talk to one another and it's impossible to actually provide insights out of that? Like where does the big challenge lie amongst other industries?
Christopher Habig
Or is it or is it or is it the economics of medicine, especially in the U.S. where I believe third party parents really hold back innovation and CMS holds back innovation and healthcare. We see monopolies in hospitals that never helps innovation. Like there's a lot of things I think we can point fingers at. And so that's why I'm curious in your opinion.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
I'm very shocked that you're insinuating entrenched business interests could slow down adoption of technology.
Christopher Habig
Dr. Razmi, I tell people at a time that healthcare is not broken. It makes a very few number of people a lot of money out there. It might not be the where we want the dollars to go, but healthcare is not broken, ladies and gentlemen.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
That's right, that's right.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
The answer would be everything you just mentioned. And actually, I have a chapter in the book that's titled Barriers to AI in Healthcare. And that's a long chapter, and I go through many barriers. However, let me give you an umbrella concept that could frame up the discussion on this topic, which is, I always say,
with a fraction of your shopping data or with a fraction of your show viewing data, Amazon and Netflix could know very useful stuff about your habits. They don't need to have the rest of your shopping, the stuff you don't do on their site to make suggestions, recommendations, learn about you, personalize your experience on their sites and so forth. And that's helpful.
It would be great if they have the rest of your data, but even if they don't, they can know a lot about you. However, in healthcare, I can know everything about you except the lab that you had done yesterday, which shows your creatinine is all of a sudden up. It's all bets are off. Everything from your entire life until yesterday.
that data becomes null and void because I no longer could do a lot of the things that I could have done based on your old data now that your kidney function is deteriorated. Healthcare by its very nature is a very it's a much more complicated field and the costs of missing stuff not having complete data making a mistake
a doctor could make a mistake and an algorithm that gets FDA approval and now millions of doctors start using it could start harming millions of patients an hour around the world. So the catastrophic consequences of a poor algorithm could disseminate very quickly. So healthcare is complicated by its very nature. Therefore
Dr. Ronald Razmi
If you have incomplete data in healthcare, it's very different than other industries. Now you're not safe turning on an algorithm because you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what data is out there about this patient that could change the picture. So some of it is not the entrenched business interest slowing it down and fragmenting data. It's just that it's a very complicated field and you're dealing with unpredictable actors. You talked about population health.
I can have the best healthcare, best doctors equipped with the best AI, sensors all over your apartment that passively monitor your activities and send that information to AI. AI figures out what's going on with you, serves it up to the doctor that says these are the issues the patient should do X, Y, and Z and the doctor should just click OK.
And then that goes to the patient, but the patient doesn't want to engage with their own health. They are, they have other things going on in their lives. They don't have time for it. And this is a, this is, this is not something they want to engage with. Look the outcome is going to be the same as not having any of that stuff because one, one actor in there has lifelong habits. They don't want to change.
Christopher Habig
Yeah, and I almost hit my mute button on my side because you got me laughing there. It's like, you could have all that in the world and bright flashing lights that says, do not eat 15 Twinkies a day. But if you still go out and smoke five packs of cigarettes and eat 15 Twinkies a day.
It's just there's the human element, I think is a blessing and also a curse when it comes to healthcare, especially as we get more and more advanced here, which, you know, by the side as an aside, when I hear people talk about bundled payments and value based care, I'm the guy in the room saying, well, what if the patients don't listen to you when you're trying to do all these different
new payment models out there. If a person just refuses to stop abusing themselves, you can't do anything. So, I mean, how do we even go through with that when we're now shifting into as a healthcare system? And I say the word system very hesitantly there. But as a system coming from, you know, the federal government and big insurers, all this rush towards value based care and hoping that AI is going to be able to provide us different insights.
How do we even adopt for that human element and not continue to penalize the physicians and providers who are the ones who are going to have fingers pointed at them if their patient needs to get readmitted? And they're saying, look, I did everything right. But Chris over here won't stop eating 15 Twinkies that the AI programming is hollering at him and flashing red lights. And what is a physician actually supposed to do in those settings?
Dr. Ronald Razmi
Yeah, first of all, I was part of a debate last week, moderated by Lovie Shapiro, where I debated the CEO of SUNY Downstate Hospital about the future of value-based care. My position in that debate was value-based care is not going to be adopted. It's been talked about for a decade and a half and nothing has really happened. So there's a lot of talk. But...
I don't see value-based care going anywhere. And you said this rush towards value-based care. You can design every contract you want on the planet. However, if the providers are not able to meet their obligations under that value-based contract, you still have to pay them. There is no such thing, oh, the patient went home, did not take care of their knee wound after surgery, and they had to come back into the hospital and be hospitalized for.
10 days, now I'm not going to give you your surgical payment because the patient did not care of their wound. That's not going to happen. And there has been a lot of lofty goals laid out by CMS and others about rolling out a value-based contract. By 2018, they said 50% of payments to doctors is going to be tied to some kind of value-based metric. That came and went. They did not even get to 5%. You can't...
Designing value-based contracts is not the same as the providers performing against those contracts. And because you have a shortage of providers, you have people who need healthcare, you can't get punitive with the doctors and saying, we're going to stop paying you. They're like, okay, well, I'm going to drop you and not see your patients in my geography. And those plans need doctors to see their patients. So the power dynamic here rests
with the providers and the options are limited. And I do not see value-based care as the future of medicine or the remedy for what's going on. In the book, I talk about the fact that United States spends more per capita than other advanced economies and has the worst outcomes. Now, what's interesting is Canada,
Dr. Ronald Razmi
France, Germany, all these advanced countries that are our peers, they have much lower total expenditure on their healthcare, and they have much better outcomes and they all do fee for service. None of them have ever even heard of value based care. Their doctors do fee for service. So are we solving the wrong problem by trying to sort of
saying let's the doctors practice a different kind of care, patients change their behavior, so we can get to where France got 30 years ago by insuring everyone and making more investments in primary care and so forth. So they keep their populations healthier. They have cost controls, which we're allergic to in this country. People say, oh, if we put in cost controls, there's gonna be less R&D.
by pharma companies and life science companies. I have news for people, they're not doing R&D. Most of the R&D happens in public institutions and when the drugs get to a certain level or the devices, they license those assets and develop them for commercialization. So the R&D is already, we're already paying taxes to subsidize an R&D in the public sector. So...
I might be more in favor of price controls than the things that our peer nations are doing than most people. And I'm skeptical given the fact that I ran a company for seven years that built population health management software. And we were on the front lines implementing that software. And we saw the adoption issues, the adoption issues where the doctors were too busy to change how they practice medicine.
patients that you know there was a novelty factor when there was a diabetes program for a couple weeks patients were motivated after A couple weeks the patients went back to like doing what they used to do They lost interest in somebody calling them and checking up on them. Have you taken your blood pressure at some point? It gets old
Christopher Habig
Yeah, I totally agree.
And, you know, from a solution standpoint, obviously, we're in the direct care world. So we said, well, why not just let the free market go ahead and do it and get out of the government interference, get out of the third payer really oligarchy that we see here. I think we both sides of that debate do agree that the payment method, you know, we've created this own currency, this separate currency that we can't use dollars and cents to actually pay for healthcare services anymore. And if we don't have a common currency amongst that to barter with, you know,
every civilization in the history of mankind has had some type of token to signify value right there. And we got away from it completely in this country by having copays and premiums and secret negotiations and super bills and all that kind of stuff. And you see where the waste and the muck goes, kind of going back to what we talked about before, that there are entrenched healthcare interests in this world. And I agree with you. I think value-based care is
I'm not even sure if it's a step in the right direction, but, you know, getting out of the stranglehold that CMS has and commercial insurance has for maintenance activities. I think that's the biggest thing that, you know, I agree with you investing more into primary care and keeping people from using the emergency room as their primary care, as their urgent care clinic and in getting universities to medical schools to produce more primary care physicians and not actively discourage them like they'll remain
Dr. Ronald Razmi
Yes.
Christopher Habig
said, but we've heard horror stories that XYZ University Medical School does not produce primary care. So you need to go be a surgeon or need to go do this one. Right. It's it. There's a lot of people at fault when it comes to that one. And so that's why I'm just saying, you know what, let's see what the market can do, because we're very close to a socialized industry right now from a payment standpoint. There's a lot of different levers and that kind of stuff. So I'm kind of the one saying, you know what, let's
Christopher Habig
artificial intelligence being able to chew through a lot of that to show that, you know what, when people have more time with a primary care physician, that leads to healthier outcomes and less spending downstream. Let physicians, let primary care physicians be able to practice.
in the full breadth of their expertise. You know, we mentioned from your biography that, you know, you trained at the Mayo Clinic and you mentioned, hey, up there we were given enough time to spend with patients. I'm just curious from your evolution as a physician, did time with the patient, was there a direct correlation or even indirect correlation in your mind that was quality? Quality equals time spent with a with a patient as a physician.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
Yes, we know Mayo Clinic has good outcomes and the whole concept behind Mayo Clinic is giving doctors enough time to study the patient's records, getting to know their patients and so forth. So that's a big part of it. And I think AI could help with a lot of that. AI could look through the records and figure things out and help the doctor kind of create that dashboard. And yeah.
Christopher Habig
And it's I think a lot of physicians will say, well, yeah, that sounds great, guys. But I have to spend the entire visit staring at my computer screen doing click throughs.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
Oh my, yeah, absolutely. It's terrible. I mean, electronic health records, it's great that the data is digitized. I fully support the federal government's push to mandate electronic health records because nothing else was getting people off paper. However, the issue is these EHRs are so poorly designed and the user interface and make doctors into typists.
I see doctors when I go and see my doctors these days, they're just typing away the whole time. Nobody is ever looking at me anymore and engaging with me. So this actually has been a setback for the digital health revolution because now doctors are very skeptical of anything new because they think, oh my God, how is this going to worsen my life now? How much more do I need to do? So
The issue in digital health and you're like, why is AI's diffusion into healthcare slower than other sectors? It's because we don't have a good track record of bringing something in that automates things for doctors and makes their lives better, or the nurses or anybody else who's involved in the healthcare sector. Therefore, they're skeptical of new things.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
help people if AI can start solving some basic issues, like helping a doctor with documentation. Ambient intelligence is a form of AI. It listens to a doctor-patient conversation, encounter, and automatically creates a note. Now I'm not saying the technology is 100% there right now where that note is beautiful and it's got everything that the doctor wants and he can just sign it.
but it's moving in that direction. Generative AI is a technology that really improves the capabilities of those kinds of solutions. Yes, that is not curing cancer. The use case that I just mentioned. However, the benefit from that, it's so tangible. The doctor's burnout issue, the giving doctors time, improving their satisfaction and the nurses and so forth.
that something like that, they're like, well, maybe this AI thing, there is something to it. Maybe if I'm open to this kind of solutions, my life will improve. And I think that's why I think solving low-hanging fruit with AI right now could create momentum so those clinical applications down the road could gain traction.
Christopher Habig
I think that was very nicely.
put and I love that you frame that in the in the mindset of a physician who's struggling right now that wants to have a human connection and just saying I'm staring at my computer screen. So how is this going to help me even if I dictate notes? I still have to go back and check it and it's a kind of step-by-step process. It's learning a new system. And so I completely agree with everything you're saying. I think this is an amazing tool as it continues to evolve and mature. Obviously we need early adopters are able to do this.
But I think we've both agreed that, you know, it's artificial intelligence can enhance that doctor patient relationship, can save time for a physician and then share insights to the patient. But ultimately, it's going to be up to the human being to be responsible on both sides of that equation.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
I think, and I think sort of going back to the sort of overall objective of our discussion and what your show is about direct primary care, about personalization of care, providing more proactive care and so forth. I only see that possible with the help of technology. Patients are getting older.
When you live longer, you develop more problems. Therefore, doctors are dealing with patients who have more problems. That doesn't give them extra time to see more patients or spend more time with their other patients, whether it's direct primary care or any other type of care. So with the help of technology, that can take some things off their plate. It can analyze data.
remote monitoring data. It can help the documentation and that kind of thing. Then doctors could have more time. Doctors could be assisted in their analysis of patient information. And as the technology advances, we're gonna have some interesting things. For example, today there are companies that can do it.
assessment for urinary tract infection using your cell phone. So you can pick up a kit from the from the CVS or have one sent to you. You can urinate in the cup and put the strip in there and then using your cell phone. Cell phone can analyze that strip and tell you if you have that's AI, that's computer vision. So there are tools now where
the doctor could listen to your heart and lung using AI technology remotely. So with those types of technologies, care could be made more convenient, more frequent without overwhelming the doctors. Therefore, in a direct care model, where you have a population of patients, you wanna provide personalized care,
Dr. Ronald Razmi
That dashboard, using the technology in a savvy way, things that have shown they can deliver on the front lines, using them more allows you to stay on top of things more, improve the health of that population that you're managing, but also doing it in a way that's much more convenient for you and for them and improves your job satisfaction. So I think in a direct care model, AI,
could be used in so many different ways and it's going to be rolled out over the next few years to enhance that model. However, I had an article published about the book and myself in Newsweek this week. And I made it clear when I was doing the interview for the piece was that the applications of AI in healthcare, including in R&D, finding new drugs and finding new insights about our
genome and microbiome and everything that we've talked about here, that is going to take decades. I want to make sure people understand in five years, I'm making no promises that AI is going to be doing all kinds of stuff. I was on a panel discussion in 2013 with Vino Cosla, who's a famous Silicon Valley investor. He used to be at Kleiner Perkins and now he has his own Cosla
They invest a lot in healthcare technology, digital health. And he said in 10 years, or he said in five years, we're not going to need a radiologist because AI is going to read all the images and so forth. Well, it's 10 years later. We need more radiologists than we did 10 years ago. AI hasn't taken over anything and it's not going to take over anything. So these predictions.
What's going to happen in three years, five years, 10 years, are very ill advised. What we do know is if we take the right steps in creating unified patient records, and we use these technologies, rolling them out in a systematic way, in two or three decades, we can step out of the stone ages and start providing much more proactive and sophisticated care.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
But the use cases over the next few years are gonna be rolled out. We are gonna see administrative use cases, operational use cases, some limited clinical use cases in radiology and dermatology and so forth. And then if those use cases show value without making everybody's life a living hell, like the doctors or the patients, the next wave...
of applications are gonna then are gonna be rolled in and gradually over time, uh, this is gonna, this is gonna have a tangible impact.
Christopher Habig
Dr. Razmi, I think that's a great way to send us home here. You know, I was gonna say, hey, where do we actually go from here? What is real from six months, a year, five, 10, 20 years in there? And you wrap that up very nicely for us and put a great big bow on it. So Dr. Ronald Razmi, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. I appreciate you joining us here on Healthcare Americana.
Dr. Ronald Razmi
It's been a pleasure to be with you. Great discussion and thank you for having me.
Christopher Habig
And a big thank you to our listeners for tuning into the show. Remember, the future of healthcare is very bright and technology like artificial intelligence is here to enhance, not replace the human touch that is so essential to care. Once again, I'm Christopher Habig. Thanks for listening.
[OUTRO]
Announcer
Check out healthcareamericana.com to hear all of our episodes. Visit the shop and learn more about the podcast. Healthcare Americana is produced and managed by Taylor Scott and iPodcastPro.
FreedomDoc
Healthcare Americana is brought to you by Freedom Healthworks and FreedomDoc. If you've been struggling to get the care you need and the access you want, it's time to join your local FreedomDoc. Visit freedomdoc.care to find the practice location nearest you.
Free Market Medical Association
Whether you're a patient's employer or physician, the Free Market Medical Association can facilitate and assist you in your free-market healthcare journey. The foundation of our association is built upon three pillars: price, value, and equality with complete transparency in everything we do. Our goal is simple, match willing buyers with willing sellers of valuable healthcare services. Join us and help accelerate the growth of the free market healthcare revolution. For more information on the Free Market Medical Association, visit fmma.org.
[END]