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When your hospital decides how to use AI, will you be in the room or will you be handed whatever someone else picked? Physicians have done this before, letting insurance and then EMRs reshape medicine before they reacted, and AI is the next force they cannot afford to ignore. Augusta Uwah is a hospitalist, physician advisor, and founder and CEO of ClinEfficiency Pro, where she builds AI tools for hospitals and revenue cycle management. This episode is based on her article “Why physician-led AI adoption is essential for health care,” published on KevinMD. You will hear why doctors who stay out risk becoming vulnerable to vendors and sidelined in their own field. You will hear the real difference between casually using ChatGPT and using AI responsibly. And you will hear where to start, from securing your ChatGPT to evaluating vendors, and why being in the room is the difference between leading AI and being handed it.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today, we welcome Augusta Uwah. She is a hospitalist and physician executive. Today’s KevinMD article is “Why physician-led AI adoption is essential for health care.” Augusta, welcome to the show.

Augusta Uwah: Hi, my name is Augusta. I am a hospitalist. Well, human first, physician second.

I have also worked in the physician advisory field, and recently I became an AI consultant, certified and CPPD accredited. I have also trained with the HarvardX Agentic AI program, as well as Physical AI. I am very much into all things AI. That said, I have also developed 52 AI apps, workflows, or agents that I use on a daily basis.

I wrote this article a few months ago, basically when I realized that AI is here, it is not coming. At that time, a lot of people were still, and some people still feel, like it is something in the future that is not really going to affect them. But it is in every aspect of our lives right now.

The way the article went was basically that physicians have a habit of ignoring things until it literally is in their face and has taken over their lives. Insurance was the first thing that happened to us. We kind of let insurance take over the medical practice to the point that physicians are no longer allowed to own hospitals, yet insurers can both own hospitals and make the rules for payment.

The second thing that came up, and we were kind of loosey-goosey about it, was business executives coming in and saying, “This is a goldmine. Let us help you make money.” And we ended up in a situation where physicians are now majorly employees and fired at will, basically, while people with business degrees in the C-suite, not all of them physicians and not all of them bad, do not necessarily have the physicians’ or patients’ best interests at heart, and are calling all the shots and going home with six figures, half a million dollars in packages.

And EMRs also came along, and physicians, older physicians, were very much against it. Younger physicians these days probably do not recall the advent of the EMR, but older physicians would say, “Oh, no, I would rather retire. Oh, no, I am not going to do this.” But now you cannot find a single hospital without an EMR. You cannot find a single clinic without an EMR. It came, and it was here to stay.

The article was basically saying that physicians should not make the same mistake about AI, and as much as possible, get in front of it. Lead. Be in the room, because if you are not in the room, you are going to be on the menu. If you do not direct the flow of what the higher-ups are doing with AI, if you do not help choose the vendors, if you are not involved in saying what AI should and should not be able to do, you are going to get handed whatever it is you get handed, and at that point, there is really nothing you can do about it.

So the article was saying that all of those were just the beginning, and now we are here with AI. Physicians just really need to get proactive about getting in front of it, learning as much about it as they can, getting together with other physicians who are very knowledgeable about AI, and ensuring that they understand what they are getting into.

Learn how to use AI responsibly, because I have a lot of physicians who come to me and say, “Yeah, I know AI. Oh yeah, AI, I use it all the time.” And I say, “OK, how are your security settings for ChatGPT? Is your information secure? Have you set up your security settings? Have you personalized your ChatGPT?” And they have no clue what I am talking about. And that is just what we call the basics.

So how much more when we talk about things like agentic AI? ChatGPT is like generative AI. And then you tell some physicians, “You know, there is ChatGPT for clinicians,” which came out after my article. So you have regular ChatGPT, and there is ChatGPT for clinicians. Which one are you using? And they say, “There is ChatGPT for clinicians?” Yes, there is. And that is just generative AI. Now we are moving into an agentic AI era, and also a physical AI era. And imagine, where the person has not even wrapped their head around the generative AI part, much more agentic AI or physical AI. So I was just trying to sound the alarm that physicians really need to wake up, get ahead of this, and get educated.

Kevin Pho: Now, when you first introduced yourself, you said you are a physician-AI consultant. Tell us the type of questions that people are coming to you with regarding the intersection of AI, health care, and physicians. What are the most common types of questions you are consulted for?

Augusta Uwah: OK. So I am an AI consultant, which is different from me being a physician. My AI consulting business is based in health care and revenue cycle management. That is a whole different ballgame. It is based on ensuring that rural hospitals do not close down. The Becker’s report recently released that about 290 hospitals are at risk of closing down in the next three years. So I made AI tools to help those hospitals ensure that they maximize their revenue and do not get swept up in all the changes with policy. I have a policy agent for that, and a revenue protection agent, and a compliance agent, and things like that. But that is separate.

So as a physician who is into AI, who talks about AI a lot, a lot of the questions I get are, “What are you even talking about?” For instance, I put up a Facebook post that said, “I had my AI agent go through my ChatGPT agents to sort through my AI agents, my specialized GPT agents, and pull them out and put them in a Notion document.” I had no idea I had 53 agents in ChatGPT, but the agents that fit the criteria for what I needed this other agent to work on for me were 24 agents. So it sorted them out based on what they do, and I kind of put that out there, like, OK, this one is for sales, this one is for revenue cycle, this is for that. And people were like, “What on earth are you talking about?”

So the issue I have is that a lot of people have no idea what I am even trying to say. I was joking with one of my friends, like, I need someone to literally translate what I am saying to people. So a lot of it is they have no idea what I am talking about. Some are like, “Can you show me how to do that?” Even those who do not really want to adopt AI are like, “But how do you do that?”

Kevin Pho: Now, for those physicians who have no idea what is going on with AI, and we both know that AI is iterating and evolving probably faster than any other technological achievement today, what is the danger for these physicians who remain out of AI and do not learn the nuances of AI? What is the danger to them?

Augusta Uwah: Well, they are going to be left behind. It is like they are going to wake up one day and it is going to be a brand-new world, basically, when they actually have to adopt this AI and use these AI tools. And they are going to find that there is such a knowledge gap between where they are and where they need to be.

And they are going to be very vulnerable to tech sellers, vendors, and people pushing all kinds of AI applications, because they are not even going to know how to choose. So you are just going to be so vulnerable. Or they are going to try to use AI and get into trouble using it, because you do not know how to set up the security, you do not know how to get AI to strip all the HIPAA information, you do not have a BAA agreement, but you went and made yourself a website because you were tinkering with AI. You understand what I am saying? You do not have the necessary fundamentals. So they can get into lots of issues if they do not educate themselves.

Kevin Pho: Now, in your article, when you say that physicians need to lead AI adoption, what exactly would that look like today?

Augusta Uwah: I will give an example of something that happened the past couple of weeks in one of the hospitals I work at. Their tech is a little behind. They do not use Epic or Cerner, which are the two top EMRs. They use a different kind of tech. And recently there was a release. They sent an email saying, “Oh, we are going to have this tournament about AI, and we want to hear your voices about what you feel AI could do, and we may end up implementing that.” And I got so excited about it, because I was like, “Oh my God, this is the opportunity that every physician needs to jump on,” because we tend to gripe a lot.

If you know physicians, we tend to get together and complain. And I was like, “Now we have a situation where they are saying, ‘Bring us complaints and let’s see what AI can do.'” And I was talking to someone who is like the assistant to the CMO, who is a physician. I was like, “Oh my God, did you just see that release?” And they were like, “What are you talking about?” So I went to the lead person in the hospital group, and I was like, “Did you see that?” And they were like, “What are you talking about?” That is what I mean. Physicians need to get on top of it. They need to lead.

They need to take advantage of those opportunities. Those opportunities will not come all the time. And sometimes nurses are better at adoption than physicians. You will see a lot of nurses have already jumped on the AI bandwagon. They are about to make their lives so much better. Nurses are all about making nursing life better. They invented the DNP, the NP-PhD, all the things. And nurses are very good at adoption, and physicians are going to end up being just a figurehead in the entire health care equation. Because at some point you are going to be questioning what a lot of physicians already do: Question what exactly is my role here?

What exactly is my role here? Because you were not participating. You did not get involved. Everybody got involved, made decisions that now affect you, and now you are like a bystander, or like a visitor in your own house. Or you are just like an onlooker.

Kevin Pho: So physicians who do not learn and get involved with AI, not only are they going to be vulnerable to vendor pitches and not able to appropriately evaluate new AI technology, but like you said, they could eventually become figureheads. And do you think that eventually they will be out of jobs and be replaced by not only AI, but of course physicians who are adept with AI?

Augusta Uwah: That is a great question, and it is very layered, and it is a question that someone has asked. So Utah initially made a law that AI could act almost like a physician in mental health. The physicians in that state actually appealed that. So there is a general, some of the richest people in the world are trying to make AI replace doctors. Some of the richest people in the world are trying to create AI that will replace physicians.

But that aside, that may not happen, for several reasons. People may not buy in. The law may not allow it, all that good stuff. But the physicians that are on top of AI, or get on the AI bandwagon, are going to be light-years ahead, and they are going to be the more sought-after physicians. And the rest of them are just going to be, I don’t know, maybe out of jobs, because these days physicians do get fired for no good reason.

Kevin Pho: So for those physicians who are listening to you on this podcast, and they may only use ChatGPT casually, and now are inspired, or maybe afraid, by what you are saying, give us a first step, what they should do to learn about AI, agentic AI, and leading AI into organizations. What is the first step they need to do?

Augusta Uwah: So the first step is, there is a ChatGPT 101 course, which I can even give as a giveaway, free, for them to look through and listen to and basically see how to secure their own ChatGPT. But I do have courses for physicians that they can use, especially to do vendor evaluation, ensuring that they are AI knowledgeable, and basically an AI director to health care workers. I do have courses for that. I believe there are other courses, both free and paid, but there are very few directed to physicians and health care workers. And if you are going for the Harvard courses or MIT courses, those are very, very advanced. If you do not know the basics, you are just going to go for those courses and end up lost, basically. You will have this really high-level information that you really do not know how to implement because you do not know the basics.

Kevin Pho: Now, is there a way for physicians to learn outside of a course? Is there something that they could do themselves by tinkering, or YouTube videos, or reading posts on LinkedIn? What are some things they can do outside of a course?

Augusta Uwah: Yeah. Like I said, you can tinker. You can check YouTube. They have free courses. There is this lady called Alicia Little, and she gives AI summits or something like that. It is not going to be physician-directed. It is going to be a lot of general AI. She makes it really sound simple. There are free YouTube courses. Things like that. You can tinker, but tinkering will only get you so far.

Kevin Pho: We are talking to Augusta Uwah. She is a hospitalist and physician executive. Today’s KevinMD article is “Why physician-led AI adoption is essential for health care.” Augusta, we will end with some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Augusta Uwah: Get on the AI bandwagon. Learn as much as you can. When your hospital or your employer is talking about AI, make sure you are in the room.

Kevin Pho: Augusta, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Augusta Uwah: No problem. Thank you, Kevin, for having me.