Artificial Intelligence in Allied Health Newsletter - December 2024

December 9, 2024

Issue: #6

Reading time: 7 minutes

Happy December everyone! In the lead up to the festive season there has been lots happening in the AI space (I feel like I say this every month, but growth remains constant and exponential still!). Recently I attended the Australasian Institute of Digital Health AI+Care conference in Melbourne, Australia. It was great to be amongst my ‘tribe’ of fellow clinicians and technologists who believe in the power of AI and are working to shape it to our benefit. There was a real focus on co-design of tools for clinicians (rather than imposing them upon them with little knowledge of clinical workflows), as well as the safety aspects of AI development for the sake of clinicians and clients. It will be fascinating to see how the conversation changes between this and next year’s AI+Care conference!

Image description: Jess, wearing a dark blue shirt and smiling in front of a AIDH banner at the AI+Care conference in Melbourne, Australia in November 2024.

Industry News

The use of AI Scribes in healthcare is exponentially increasing this year. AI scribes are classified as “ambient listening AI” and they work by “listening” to clinical sessions, filtering in/out ‘relevant’ information and then automating the note taking process into your preferred template. In previous newsletters I’ve shared the tool Heidi Health which is one example of an AI scribe but there are now at least 55 products on the market. If you’re keen to know more about AI scribes, check out Dr Terence Tan’s article here. 

In the LLM space:

OpenAI (the developers of ChatGPT) has launched a “12 days of Christmas,” with announcements each day over a 12 day period in the lead up to the festive period. So far they’ve announced the launch of their o1 and o1 pro models, accompanied by an additional subscription tier “pro” for unlimited access to their most advanced models.

Amazon has announced a new collection of AI models, making their official entry into the AI space. They’ve released four text generation models, an image and video generation model.

Microsoft have launched Copilot Vision in the Edge browser, which will allow you to talk to Copilot about what’s on your screen, it can understand what you’re talking about and respond through voice.

AI Resource of the Month

NotebookLM

https://notebooklm.google/

What does it do?

NotebookLM allows you to upload 'source' documents and resources and uses these to summarise, answer questions or generate content. Some of the inbuilt prompts include 'create a study guide' and 'create an FAQ'. It can even create a freakishly-realistic podcast from your content; you have to give it a try!

Privacy & data

NotebookLM (made by Google) states that it does not use your data to train it's AI model. But it looks like any uploaded data is stored (securely and anonymised). That means it's important to keep identifiable, sensitive or confidential client information out of the tool.

Quick disclaimer: I’m sharing this tool for informational purposes only, not endorsing it. This is not a sponsored post. Please review all AI tools to ensure they meet your practice’s privacy, security, and professional standards.

Have you tried NotebookLM? I’d love to hear how you’re using it in your practice!

Research

Will AI replace clinical decision-making in our lifetime?

A recent article in the Future Healthcare Journal presents a debate on this important topic. See the article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2514664524015686

Let's explore both sides of the debate-

The affirmative argue that AI will replace clinical decision making because of:

1. Economic efficiency

2. Potential for AI to outperform human clinicians in the future

3. Patient preference, empowerment and affordability

The arguments against suggest the following factors will influence this:

1. Human centred care

2. Limited ability of AI to quickly apply knowledge to real world clinical scenarios

3. Lack of explainability and trust

4. Bias & data integrity issues

The debate underscores that while AI will play an increasing role in healthcare, it’s unlikely to completely replace human clinicians. Instead, we may see a collaborative future where AI enhances, rather than replaces, human decision-making.

Prompt of the Month

Each month, I’ll be sharing a useful AI prompt designed to enhance your practice. This month I’m sharing a prompt for translating and interpreting the context of a conversation/ verbal dialogue.

Prompt:

You are a language translation and interpretation expert. Your task is to translate the following dialogue into [target language] while ensuring that the cultural nuances, tone, and intent of the conversation are preserved. Provide the translation, followed by a brief explanation of how you interpreted the context and adapted the translation to maintain its meaning and tone. 

Tried this prompt? Send me an email and let me know how you found it!