May 21, 2026
42 min watch
Key takeaways:
- Using AI outside the clinic can help doctors get acquainted with it before applying it to clinical situations.
- AI models are useful for different types of tasks depending on how they were trained.
Doctors who have not yet started using AI tools should first get comfortable using them in everyday life before adopting them in clinical practice.
That is the advice from optometrist Scott A. Edmonds, OD, FAAO, a member of the Healio AI Advisory Board who has been using AI in various areas of his practice.
“You learn to use the tool in a much less stressful environment,” Edmonds said. “You learn how the model works and how it thinks. … Then when I go to use it in the real world, in the clinic, I’m more attuned. I’m not afraid of it. I know what to ask it.
“Play with it in everyday life first, and then take your knowledge base, go into the clinic and use it.”
Edmonds joined Hansa Bhargava, MD, Healio’s chief clinical strategy and innovation officer, in a Healio Community webinar focused on AI in health care.
He explained that his practice had not adopted AI until a patient who was a specialist in large language models, the technology behind services such as ChatGPT, explained how it could be beneficial.
“She started telling me her background and asking me why we didn’t use [AI] in our practice. And I was like, ‘Well, I’m not really sure how,’” Edmonds said. “She gave me CliffsNotes, and within a week, we started to use it. Within a month, we were using it every single day, especially the AI scribes, which were just really a no-brainer for the kind of work we do in terms of capturing clinical data and putting it into a format that’s medically and legally easy.”
Since then, his office’s use of AI has expanded. One way he frequently uses large language models is to keep up with the potential side effects and drug interactions of medications patients are taking, particularly ones newly approved by the FDA.
“[Patients] expect you to know. And unless you’re using this kind of model, you can’t keep up,” he said. “That’s very helpful in everyday clinical practice because a day doesn’t go by there isn’t a new drug that somebody’s asking me about.”
Edmonds explained that different AI chatbots are better for different purposes.
He described ChatGPT as a “Swiss Army Knife of AI” trained on a wide variety of information, peer reviewed or not. On the other hand, products such as Healio AI ingest a more targeted range of fact-checked information and could be more appropriate for use in health care.
Still, Edmonds cautioned that the answers from AI cannot necessarily be trusted.
“It isn’t the end-all be-all. It has to be just a piece of information,” he said. “It’s only as good as, A, the database and, B, how you prompted it.”
For more information:
Hansa Bhargava, MD, can be reached at primarycare@healio.com. Scott A. Edmonds, OD, FAAO, can be reached at optometry@healio.com.
Sources/Disclosures
Source:
Webinars
Disclosures:
Bhargava is Healio’s chief clinical strategy and innovation officer. Edmonds reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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