In this special Speaker Series, Becker's Healthcare caught up with Mihir Patel, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at OrthoIndy.
Dr. Patel will speak on a panel during the Becker's Hospital Review 4th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference that is titled "Putting Medicine Back Into Medicine: Ongoing Problems of Technology Misuse, Patient Care, and Physician Burnout," at 2:00 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 20. Learn more about the event and register to attend in Chicago.
Question: What is the most exciting thing happening in health IT right now?
Dr. Mihir Patel: The most exciting thing happening in health IT right now is the implementation of [artificial intelligence]. The required adoption of the EHR brought fundamental change to the practice of medicine — good and bad. AI has the sophistication to transform and place the doctor-patient relationship back into the hands of the provider at every level of practice while meeting regulatory requirements in an extremely cost efficient manner. Truly transformative AI has improved my own practice and my staff’s in the time we have been using it. The reality of the situation is that most of us went to medical school to take care of patients in our respective fields. If we had wanted to type notes, edit notes and speak with insurance representatives the majority of our practice time we would have skipped taking the MCAT, applying to medical school and working 90-hour weeks in residency learning from patients for multiple years. AI has restored the art of medicine in our practice by simplifying many of these duties required by the adoption of the EHR and allowing me to spend even more time with more patients. To date myself, AI has taken the Commodore 64 and made it into an iPhone [or] Android.