For physicians navigating the growing AI landscape, the question of whether the tools they use are safe is an ongoing one. Understanding the capabilities and use cases of medical AI chatbots, assistants, and scribes is the first step to regulatory compliance, patient safety, and workflow efficiency. But the knowledge piece is where things get tricky.
Knowing what to look for in trusted AI tools is key. In this article, we’ll uncover how AI is used in healthcare, what clinicians should look for when testing, and how doctors, including residents, responsibly integrate AI into their daily practice.
What Are Medical AI Chatbots and Assistants?
Medical AI chatbots and assistants are digital tools powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning models. Also called “clinical AI” or “healthcare AI”, they can answer medical questions, summarize medical articles and literature, draft documents, and provide clinical decision support.
The goal is for doctors to leverage AI to streamline their workflows, reducing their administrative burden and burnout. Some AI tools perform multiple functions, whereas others serve a single purpose. Examples of AI tool use include:
- Live-recording and transcribing patient visits, producing a summary at the end of the appointment.
- Surfacing relevant, evidence-based clinical information based on physician questions and prompts.
- Drafting referral letters and other patient communication.
- Role-playing practice for resident doctors.
And more. Each function carries a different level of clinical risk and is used to varying degrees in different clinical settings.
Safety and Healthcare: Where Does AI Fit?
Of course, not every AI chatbot or assistant is designed for clinical practice. Many public-facing tools are trained on broad internet data and may not meet the safety requirements for use in healthcare.
For healthcare professionals, the most important boxes to check are whether the AI tool is purpose-built for healthcare, HIPAA-compliant, trained on peer-reviewed or evidence-based research and literature, and can be integrated into clinical workflows.
Additionally, AI tooling should be transparent about where it sources outputs and how it stores data. Physicians should be able to view and validate cited sources and trust that data from inputs is secure. And because AI tools should be used as guides, not decision-makers, the best AI tooling encourages human oversight, edits, and use as a guide rather than a definitive resource.
How AI for Clinicians Is Improving Physician Workflows
Now more than ever, clinicians are burdened by mounting administrative work. When AI is used responsibly, that burden is significantly reduced. Not only are workflows streamlined, but patients and physicians gain more quality appointment time, making both parties feel more heard and conversations more valuable. Other benefits include:
- Faster clinical documentation: Clinicians can draft progress notes, summarize patient appointments, extract key findings from conversations, and reduce after-hours charting time.
- Easier medical retrieval: Instead of Googling or using another search engine to sift through evidence and resources, medical AI chatbots can summarize evidence and provide an overview of clinical topics in seconds.
- Quick drug lookup: Chatbots can also surface drug monograph data, making it easier for doctors to access quick comparison guidelines for treatment plans.
Why Medical AI Can Be Particularly Helpful for Resident Doctors
For resident doctors, the benefits of medical AI go even further. Residency often involves long hours, constant learning, and sometimes even more strenuous documentation work than that of physicians. Clinical AI assistants and chatbots support their challenges in a few ways.
First, it accelerates their clinical learning. AI can surface and summarize disease overviews, diagnostic pathways, and evidence-based treatment options. It can also help with on-the-spot testing practice, enabling students to feel better prepared when quizzed on the job.
The right AI tooling also improves clinical preparation. Before their rounds or procedures, residents can use AI tools to quickly review relevant medical information or potential guideline updates. And, much like for seasoned physicians, documentation and charting work is streamlined with AI, producing drafts and summaries when needed.
Best Practices for Using Medical AI in Clinical Practice
Healthcare professionals looking to test and trial medical AI products can use the following best practices to guide them:
- Stick to HIPAA-compliant tooling.
- Verify AI outputs come from trusted medical sources.
- Use AI primarily for informal and administrative tasks, rather than for direct clinical decision-making.
- Follow institutional guidelines for AI use.
- Maintain clinical judgement as the final authority.
And keep in mind that you don’t have to convert every aspect of your workflow to AI by tomorrow. Start with small applications, and build up your use, integrating more AI features when it makes sense for your workflow.
Blend Safety and Accessibility With Doximity
Doximity is a trusted healthcare tool, used by over 85% of U.S. physicians. With products like DoxGPT, Doximity Scribe, and Doximity Dialer, doctors, nurse practitioners, and PAs can streamline workflows, reduce clinical burden, and engage in effective clinical decision management.
DoxGPT works with the ease and speed of many public-facing chatbot products while remaining HIPAA-compliant. It uses clinical evidence and PeerCheck™ to provide structured responses to prompts. Users can surface diagnostic information, summarize medical articles, and even look up drug monograph data.
Doximity Scribe, the AI transcription tool, live-records patient appointments and generates a summary of the appointment. Once generated, Scribe then deletes the original recording, ensuring patient privacy and streamlined charting in one function.
Doximity Dialer, the intuitive telehealth tool, enables physicians to call, text, or video-call their patients with their personal devices while keeping their personal phone numbers private. This makes connecting with patients more flexible and accessible with every appointment.
The best part about Doximity tooling? It’s that it’s safe, easy to use, and free.
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As the tooling matures, medical AI should serve as a guide to support physician expertise rather than replace clinical judgment. Doximity was built with clinical guidance in mind.
Signing up is simple, requiring only valid healthcare credentials. Get started and discover how clinical AI can be secure, effective, and easy in your practice.