Don't Get Automated

In this episode of the Talking Rehab Podcast, Dr. Fred Bagares dives into the evolving role of artificial intelligence in the healthcare space, particularly within the world of rehabilitation. From streamlining administrative tasks to improving accessibility for patients with language or hearing challenges, AI clearly has its benefits. But is it making healthcare more human—or less?

Dr. Bagares shares real-world examples from his own practice, discusses how he's experimenting with AI tools like ChatGPT, and questions the growing trend of replacing human interaction with automation in medical settings. If you're a healthcare provider, patient, or simply curious about how tech is shaping your care experience, this episode will challenge your thinking.

Timestamps:

• [00:00] Intro: What is rehabilitation and why this podcast exists
• [01:00] The inspiration for this episode: AI in patient communication
• [02:00] Pros of AI in clinic operations and task automation
• [04:00] Using AI to simplify patient intake and FAQs
• [05:00] Improving accessibility through transcription and translation
• [06:00] The trade-off: Efficiency vs. Human Connection
• [07:00] Concerns with AI replacing frontline communication
• [08:00] Automation fatigue: Is AI really answering the patient’s question?
• [10:00] Communication as a therapeutic tool in rehabilitation
• [12:00] Multidisciplinary care and the problem with fragmented communication
• [13:00] Why human interaction is still irreplaceable
• [14:00] Final thoughts: AI as a support tool, not a replacement

Call to Action:
Like what you heard? Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's curious about the future of healthcare. For more movement-centered insights, follow me @drfredbagares or visit linktr.ee/drfredbagares. See you next week on The Talking Rehab Podcast.

Transcript

0:00

What is rehab or rehabilitation? My name is Fred, be Garris, a board certified sports and spine medicine physician in Virginia Beach, Virginia. After 10 years of practice, I still find musculoskeletal medicine both fascinating and challenging. I. This podcast is about the lingering thoughts and questions I've had after residency and fellowship. My hope is to spark discussion, challenge, dogma, and share my experiences in musculoskeletal medicine. Welcome to The Talking Rehab Podcast. I. So the other day I, so the other day I placed a call to a local, physician's office trying to get some medical records. And, of course I was on hold at least, no one picked up right away. And as I was listening to the different, announcements, I noticed that there was a new feature being added to their system where they said basically now members of the practice have the ability to text their questions and this should hopefully improve access, and speed things along. And as I listened to it, I was at least from. My standpoint as I'm on hold, I was wondering whether or not texting would actually improve anything. And yet I was also, talking to a recording and so that, that grabbed my attention in the moment as is this really a good idea? is because at the end of the day, someone still has to answer it. This is the topic of today's episode is really talking about ai. I know ai, artificial intelligence is on the mind of pretty much everybody. Things are just moving at lightning speed, but particularly as a business owner, there's definitely some pros and cons and, So I thought it would be a good opportunity, to talk about AI in the context of what I'm trying to do in my practice and how I use it in rehabilitation and what it, but overall, what it might mean in the big picture of things. Overall, I think we can pretty much conclude that artificial intelligence is here to stay and while it's, it can be scary at the speed that things are moving, on some level, I think we do need to embrace it and see how we can make it work for ourselves, not only as, customers, employers, but also even patients. So I've been evaluating my practice to see what ways I can use AI and where places where I should not use AI in order to deliver the type of care that I think is best. overall I wanted to talk about the general pros, of using AI primarily. I've been using chat, chat, GPTN eight N. I've been trying to learn the different, t techniques and approaches. but overall I've been using it mainly to automate a lot of my tasks. There are certain aspects of, registering patients, getting them into the system. Trying to organize, follow up phone calls, things like that. And they definitely can take up some time. There's often a lot of clicking. there's a lot of waiting between clicks and so anything I can automate where, It saves me time so I can be doing other things like taking care of patients. Obviously that's the better. it also helps with, keeping down, the payroll in terms of trying to, as I scale my practice, I. Trying to keep things, where the overhead is better controlled. So I've definitely been using it to automate, some of my day-to-day tasks, which has subsequently helped with, the efficiency Other things it's been quite useful for is simplifying, FAQ questions, frequently asked questions. I do have it on my website, but. If you're like me, it's not really fun having to scroll and scroll, and no matter where I put it on the page, it's sometimes just generally hard to find. So I do the chat, the chat agents or the chat bots where you can, as opposed to just trying to find it on your own. If you don't have the time, you can simply just punch in the question. and then I can. preload my, the answers to the frequently asked questions. And there you go. You can still, you can get the answer quickly and that generally can make the experience a little bit easier, from an accessibility standpoint. many of my patients have pain, but they also have some communication difficulties. So utilizing talk to text, Some people will record their messages and send them to me. they can. And subsequently, when it comes through my system, it is transcribed, which definitely makes it easier for me to, respond to a little bit faster, having to go through the old school voicemail. Putting in your pin code, listening to the automation, punching in the numbers, it can, it's much, much easier when it comes in, as a transcription. From my standpoint, everybody kind of wins. in terms of language barriers, this has actually been quite surprising. I didn't really think, to use this and then it just hit me. I do have, folks that. speak other languages or English is not their primary language. Some of them are a hearing impaired, so this actually has become pretty helpful as well. I've, you, I've been able to utilize chat, GPT, to translate a lot of my, a lot of my notes and even, some of the frequently asked questions, which I think is really super, super helpful. Now in terms of the overall, I guess my, I'll call them my concerns. Not necessarily cons, but more of concerns. Getting back to my example in the beginning, I. Communication, I believe is key in any therapeutic relationship part, but particularly when it comes to rehabilitation and. One of my concerns is that businesses, particularly the big box medical practices, hospital based medical practices are using agents AI in order to help automate the phone system. The phone calls coming through, getting back to people, and while that might be a more efficient. For them to handle all the messages. I think it really eliminates the human to human interaction, which for, a provider standpoint might be helpful because it helps, it does help the person that's in front of you, which is a human. But at the same time, when you are someone calling in. It is still nice to actually get an actual person on the other line. and in my example, they are talking about here is a text feature where as opposed to listening to this automation, you can now text us your concerns, your questions. And I've been at these kind of, I've worked at these kind of places. I know exactly what's gonna happen is that the text message is going to go through, but. The unfortunate truth is that This chat queue is not usually monitored by someone even though it should be. And so it does get collected into basically a pile of questions as it comes in throughout the day, but someone still has to actually truly sift through it. While it has solved the incoming call volume issue, it hasn't actually really solved necessarily the, communication piece where the question is being answered in a timely manner. The question is being answered, by a human, or maybe that sometimes the questions are not. are very specific where, the AI agent doesn't necessarily have a direct answer and will spit out some generic response, which actually doesn't help you. And I think we've all been there, we've all felt that, where it's please ask her a question. And then it gives you like three or four different options or, and you can just tell you're talking to a robot and. if you're like me, I end up just putting operator and just hitting send because you can auto, at least in my experience, you can tell that the agent or the robot is going down the wrong road. that's not actually even really. AI specific. I think it's just a general problem sometimes when you even get a human that is really just reading off of a script. the output isn't exactly great either. I, Overall, it does have me a little bit concerned, in the big picture of things, the healthcare field has not been an early adopter of technology, in, in some, in a lot of ways. So I think there is some time for, AI to get better to mature. and, Get implemented in a more seamless way. But to me, the main problem in healthcare isn't exclusively the volume. It's more of the fact that there is less human interaction. The human to human interaction is something that is not going to be replaced. Now, as I said, AI is getting better. they're becoming more humanoid, but they're still not actual humans. And I worry that AI will be really good at fielding phone calls, being treat, essentially triaging questions, pointing people to the right direction, but. I don't know when it comes to healthcare, I just don't think that is going to meet a lot of people's needs. They still need someone to actually talk to, just having the answer isn't always reassuring. sometimes you want someone to actually walk you through, make sure that the robot gave you the right answer, that sort of thing. And, I think it's important to. Essentially eliminate the layers. Like I think efficiency is important to have in the workers day to day, but part of the problem shouldn't be the fact that a person has to talk to a person if people. People need to interact with one, one another, not only for the therapeutic, relationship piece of things, but in order to get better at communicating with humans. And so we can try and teach robots, teach agents to communicate with humans, but that doesn't actually make us better at communicating with humans. Just because you can program something to talk to a human doesn't mean that you're great at communication and it's a skill that needs to be practiced and. We are all on our devices. We all like to text and email. That's all well and good, but at the end of the day, we're all still, we're all still humans. Now, why this is specific to rehabilitation is that, at least in my world, in a rehabilitation is a team based approach. This is not something where, it's a simple pill. It's a simple surgery. It's a one-to-one interaction, and then the problem is solved. Oftentimes when there's problems with mobility, problems with pain, all of the above, it is a multidisciplinary, effort. So sometimes I refer people to physical therapy, occupational therapy, massage therapy, or refer people to, get certain medications, get injections. If I, if there's something that I can't provide. and I think they need a very specialized, let's say, pain, inter pain injection. That's something that I don't do. I'm gonna have to refer them to that person. And sometimes also with surgeons. now this multidisciplinary approach, unfortunately, is not usually housed in one roof. So I can, I'm already seeing my patients having to call me. They get me. Then I have to refer them to a physical therapist or, an orthopedic surgeon's office. And they're running into automation, and there's less humans. And that's one of the features of my practice is that I want to be the one answering the phone because I believe it. That's part of where the therapeutic relationship starts. If I'm an amazing physician, but then the person is so frustrated, jumping through all these loops just to talk to me, the relationship is already strained and I haven't even really started to work on the person and trying to figure out their problem. So it's a feature of my practice that I am not going to change. there has to be. A human at the front of my practice, I just don't see other businesses adopting the same philosophy and to each their own. But at the same time, if these businesses, these big box medical groups, hospital systems are adopting ai, that's great. However, what happens to the patient? what happens to the consumer experience? what happens to the patient, physician, interaction. just because I can automate something to tell a person a simple answer to their question, it's not the same thing as it actually coming across from an actual person. And again, that's part of the therapeutic effect, is actually connecting with someone. that has a solution for your problem. Someone that actually hears your problem, not just catalogs it and indexes for the right answer and then spits something out. I think that's really important. But, nevertheless, I will have to end on a positive side of AI is I am working very hard at coming up with different innovations and solutions. One of the things that I am excited about is that with ai, I have a lot of ideas for different types of patients and with. Essentially with my workflow, I'm coming up with very customized programs for my patients, which I'm super excited about. but at the end of the day, AI is here to stay, be, be cognizant of who you're receiving your care from. Again, if they're super AI heavy in the front, that doesn't mean that they can't help you. I'm just mentioning it as a factor because the therapeutic relationship really starts as soon as the person reaches out. If that person is frustrated or can't get through, then there's no relationship. They can't be helped. So just something to think about, as we all start to move forward into the new age. New technology. It's exciting, but some things that we need to be cognizant of. once again, thanks again for listening. If you have any questions, you know where to find me. Talk to you next week. I. Thank you for listening to The Talking Rehab podcast. I hope that this podcast stimulates you to question your own practice and how you approach rehabilitation. I truly appreciate your time and attention. If you enjoyed listening, make sure to like and subscribe to the podcast. I wish you a movement filled day. Take care.