Fixing Healthcare, Technology, & Burnout w/ Dr. John Yaft

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Erik Sunset: All right. Hello and welcome back. I’m Erik Sunset, your host of the DocBuddy Journal. Here at DocBuddy. We deliver healthcare solutions that take the pain and costs outta broken workflows can learn more about DocBuddy and all of our solutions at docbuddy.com. And today we’ve got a great guest. We’re joined by Dr.

Erik Sunset: John Yaft. Dr. Yaft is a board certified internal medicine physician that is currently the Chief Medical Officer for the Baylor Scott and White Irving Campus located in Texas. Dr. Yaft also serves as Medical Director of Utilization Review and holds an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine for Texas A& M.

Erik Sunset: Dr. Yaft, thanks for joining us.

Dr. Yaft: Erik, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to our discussion.

Erik Sunset: Yeah, me too. And before we started to record, we noted it’s potentially a tough day in Texas for some with the Luka Doncic trade to the Lakers. So hopefully all of our listeners in Texas are holding it together. All of them that are Mavs fans, anyway.

Dr. Yaft: I would say it was a sad day in Dallas a couple days ago with with [00:01:00] the news. I think people are still processing it. Um, but hopefully it’ll turn out to be a good move for both organizations.

Erik Sunset: Well, I know there’s a lot of Mavs fans hoping so. But to turn our, uh, to turn our attention to the matter at hand, I know we’ve got a lot that we want to cover, and we’re going to start with a big question to start with, and that is through your lens of utilization review, what do you think can be done right now versus what do you think can be done long term to improve health care, improve costs and improve outcomes for patients of the U.

Erik Sunset: S.?

Dr. Yaft: in about five years time that I’ve been doing utilization review work, um, I’ve noted that there’s a lot more friction points on the hospital side and with payers as well. There’s a lot more man hours going in on both, both fronts. Uh, so I think that there’s definitely an opportunity to streamline the workflow for both the payers and, uh, the health [00:02:00] systems.

Dr. Yaft: Um, just simply, there’s a lot of cases that can get identified more easily. and limit some of the administrative burden that goes into those workflows. Um, the challenge sometimes is having the right information at the right place. Uh, there are many calls that I’ll often have with payers, um, to evaluate a medical necessity for a patient.

Dr. Yaft: And simply put, you may have a conversation thinking, you know, why am I even talking about if this person should be in the hospital? They’re definitely sick. And you get on the phone with your peer and they say, we don’t have any information. Um, no one faxed it over. And a lot of people laugh when I tell them we still use the fax machine very, very heavily, uh, in healthcare.

Dr. Yaft: And so I think that there are ways that we can look at technology to make workflows smoother, get people the right information at the right time. Um, that’s probably a great [00:03:00] first step. And then looking at all the clinical pieces to it, um, and potentially leveraging technology on that front would probably be the next step.

Erik Sunset: Well, and then for a little bit of a, a little bit broader context for our listeners out there that may not be familiar with utilization review, maybe a quick primer there, we can go a little bit deeper into some of what you just said.

Dr. Yaft: Sure. So there’s a lot of different flavors to utilization review. There’s utilization review on the hospital side where we assess Um, the right resources for the right patient and what, what needs to be allocated for those patients. And we do that by different units. Um, and then sort of the one that people are most familiar with is the utilization review or utilization management that evaluates the medical necessity.

Dr. Yaft: Uh, for services rendered in the hospital setting or on the outpatient side, and that’s the one that interfaces generally with health care payers.

Erik Sunset: Yeah. So when you, when you talk [00:04:00] about the availability of information, it’s, it’s sad, but true. I mean, healthcare is like the last bastion for the commercial use of fax, at least that I’m familiar with, you know, even car dealerships have mainly gone electronic these days. Uh, why do you think that is?

Dr. Yaft: Uh, part of it, I think, stems from a safety perspective, um, and I don’t necessarily see it this way, but FACS has generally been seen as a little bit more HIPAA compliant, but if you have a FACS machine that’s accessible by multiple people who shouldn’t be seeing, you know, specific clinical information, is that really HIPAA compliant?

Dr. Yaft: And so there’s a lot of arguments to be made that that’s not necessarily true, but that is generally the argument is that it’s generally more secure, more HIPAA compliant. But I think we Are at a time we’re looking at different ways to move information is going to be better, especially from a [00:05:00] safety perspective.

Erik Sunset: Oh, sure. And I find that interesting with a career in health IT that practice administrators, hospital administrators, ASC administrators, for that matter, everybody in between. Knows that email’s not the right thing to do. You can’t just open up Gmail and send a message with PHI. That’s a, that’s a problem.

Erik Sunset: That’s a violation of HIPAA law. There’s lots of great encrypted email products out there.

Dr. Yaft: Right?

Erik Sunset: It would seem to me that that is ripe for more adoption than it’s gotten. But what do I know? But I go back to, um, just improving healthcare as a whole. That, that friction that we alluded to between the payer or the healthcare organization.

Erik Sunset: Um, and the payer, if I said payer twice, I meant to say provider and the payer. What can we do to streamline that? Because that seems to be the biggest burden to get the care that a patient needs in 2025.

Dr. Yaft: Uh, like I said, information in the right place at the right [00:06:00] time is going to be the driver of reducing friction. Uh, the other challenges on the provider side. A lot of the providers are just wanting to take care of their patients. They’re not wanting to necessarily worry about so many of the nuances that get tied to billing practices and what needs to be included and what doesn’t.

Dr. Yaft: Um, so really leveraging any sort of technology that identifies You know, I, I saw this patient. The patient has medical necessity for this. Um, you should generate this type of visit or this type of code. Um, and really take the administrative thought process for that physician, uh, would be helpful as a first step on that side. And then I’d say pushing the information from whether or not that’s the clinic or the hospital. To the payer so that they have that in real time and they may have their ways to identify if something meets medical [00:07:00] necessity or not. Um, at which point it would determine, okay, do I need to have a conversation with that physician?

Dr. Yaft: Um, is this medically necessary? Is there more to the story that they didn’t include in their documentation? So just the push of that information of how it ebbs and flows, uh, would make it much easier because there’s a big lag time also in terms of when payers get information, um, they may call a provider and say, Hey, can you tell me about this?

Dr. Yaft: And I say, Hey, this was four months ago. You know, I don’t necessarily recall. all the nuances to this patient’s care. And so I think getting information in real time, having it potentially be accessible by multiple stakeholders. And so it’d be easy to access and say, Oh, you know, I noticed that they didn’t have this MRI results or they didn’t see that the blood cultures came back, um, which would save a lot of time.

Dr. Yaft: So if they got that information in real time, there’d be no need for a [00:08:00] 10, 15 minute conversation. And when you add up those 10, 15 minute conversations across the board. Um, it’s a lot of man hours. It’s a lot of resources, and it’s a lot of money. Um, there are better ways to use that money and better ways to apply it to patient care rather than, you know, everybody’s trying to, you know, chase somebody else to have a conversation.

Erik Sunset: Well, one of the things that’s interesting to me about what you just said there is that when you look at it a little bit more through a revenue cycle lens between the payer and provider relations, you know, certain payers in certain states, and we hear this from our partners, we hear this from There’s a long string of just, automatic denials.

Erik Sunset: Submit a claim for payment. It’s denied. And here’s why. And then somebody at the practice or at the facility or at the hospital is looking at that claim and going, this is a clean claim. Everything checks out, resubmit, and then the cycle repeats a couple more times. When you’re working in as close to real time as you can get, or as you would like to, uh, for things like prior [00:09:00] authorizations or medical necessity, How does that conversation differ from that automated claim rejection that you get on the revenue cycle side of things?

Dr. Yaft: So, a lot of times the auto, the rejections on that front happen to do with the lack of information. Um, and I think if they had the full information, then it’s easier to assess, was this a true rejection based on something that was missed on the care side? Or is this an administrative miss? Was there a missed address of, you know, a date of birth that doesn’t align, um, things of that nature.

Dr. Yaft: Those are smaller things that are easy to fix. But they have a lot of implications if they’re delayed and you have to rinse and repeat and do it for, you know, a month, two months, three months. Um, so those are things that I think automation on both sides would be valuable. Now, on the payer side, if their criteria are a way that, um, result [00:10:00] in a lot more denials because they have an automated process, you may never get to an alignment because what they think is medical necessity.

Dr. Yaft: would be vastly different from what the provider is saying. No, this is what I think is medically necessary. So, if you get to a point where you’re in a constant disagreement for what’s medical necessity, what’s considered gold standard, um, then it’s a difficult conversation, and I don’t think, no matter what resource or technology you have in place, You’re just not aligning, um, the, what is the clinician’s input versus what’s the payer’s input.

Dr. Yaft: And the payer often hires, uh, physicians to deem what’s medically appropriate. However, sometimes on the payer side, those physicians may not be Um, experts in their area, they may be an internal medicine physician dictating what’s a medically necessity, what’s a medically necessary orthopedic procedure.

Dr. Yaft: The [00:11:00] orthopedic surgeon may say, no, this is what’s considered standard practice and it may not align with what the payer says. And so until that, there’s more conversation around the appropriateness. Um, what’s the right thing to do for the patient? No matter what resources in place, you’re still have the potential to have some friction at that area.

Erik Sunset: What do you do to resolve that? Because that obviously sounds absurd to a layperson, but you deal with it every day. I hear about people dealing with it every day. How do you get to a decent resolution there?

Dr. Yaft: So I think ongoing conversations between payers, providers, health systems, uh, really looking at, you know, long term data as well. Um, You can take, for example, what’s very hot in the news right now are GLP 1s, all the weight loss drugs and all the buzz around it. Um, they are costly, which makes a lot of payers resistant to approve them, um, and only approve them for specific, [00:12:00] uh, diagnoses such as diabetes and obesity.

Dr. Yaft: Um, That being said, do you look at a longer picture five to 10 years and you say, you know, if this reduces their cardiovascular risk by X percent, are they less likely to be hospitalized and therefore less likely have costs attributed from a total cost of care perspective, um, which out, which is much more substantial than the cost of the drug at the index of that.

Dr. Yaft: And so I think when you look at it longitudinally, that’s where you start to say, maybe there’s yeah. a bigger win for everybody. There’s bigger wins for the patients. There’s bigger wins for the payers long term from a cost perspective. And then health systems, they’re obviously faced with capacity challenges and, you know, reducing how many people wouldn’t require acute care, especially in areas where That’s our scarce is also going to be a win.

Erik Sunset: That makes sense. And one [00:13:00] thing you just mentioned there around the longitudinal view of this, we’ve had some other leading providers on the show talking about Diabetes care, and it’s really tough for a provider to be in certain diabetes care arrangements because they will do everything in their power, just like you will, just like your colleagues will to ensure that patient has a great outcome.

Erik Sunset: But you are not able to change physics. You’re not able to necessarily stop somebody from smoking. You can lead that horse to water all day, every day. Ultimately, the individual is accountable to their smoking status. So, if you could say anything, or I guess the better way to phrase it, if you could Inception style put a thought into the minds of all healthcare consumers in the U.

Erik Sunset: S., all Americans, I guess, if you will, what would you want to see happen?

Dr. Yaft: I would love to see an alignment of sort of long term goals more on the value front for [00:14:00] patients. Um, because you may get the questions from patients say, Okay, I hear about value based care. But what does that really mean? Who’s the value for? Is it for patients? Is it for health systems or is it for payers?

Dr. Yaft: Um, yeah. We’d love to think that it’s for patients, but there’s so many layers built into a lot of these value based programs that you start to wonder, are we misaligned and what we’re trying to deliver for patients? Um, I think patients really, they want to look at things from a perspective of how do I get better?

Dr. Yaft: How do I live? Well, um, what are things that prevent me from going to the hospital? But again, like you said, there’s a lot of patients that don’t have that self investment, which leads to a lot of, uh, cost for that patients. They may be you know, circling back to [00:15:00] doing things that may get them in the hospital, smoking, drug abuse, alcohol abuse.

Dr. Yaft: Um, but then again, are there resources for those patients that are valuable? Is there an underlying mental health issue that we can help fix? Um, so there’s a lot of pieces, but I think if we have a shared alignment between the stakeholders, then I think Patients may start to have a greater trust for health care because they’ll say, Hey, everybody’s kind of on the same page.

Dr. Yaft: Um, and I think until we get there, a lot of these resources and technological advances may not have the impact that we wish they would until we have a little bit more common ground.

Erik Sunset: That was a really eloquent answer to a question that was phrased in a very clunky way, so thanks for, thanks for picking me up there.

Dr. Yaft: Sure,

Erik Sunset: And then technology keeps coming up in our conversation, and we, when we spoke before, uh, we recorded, you had a really [00:16:00] interesting phrase, uh, around technology for providers or for healthcare facilities.

Erik Sunset: And it was three steps. It was excitement about a new technology, a learning curve, and then regulation. I, I had never heard it framed that way, but I really like it. I’d love to hear some more thoughts from you on that.

Dr. Yaft: sure. So anytime we hear about a new resource that could potentially make a workflow easier, smoother, faster, there is a lot of buzz, a lot of excitement. Uh, everybody wants to jump to see how that they can use it in their daily practice or how that they can partner with their nursing staff or case management staff.

Dr. Yaft: Um, and as I mentioned before, you looked at the excitement with the electronic medical record and there was a lot of folks saying, Oh, finally, I can read doctor’s notes without having to figure out what the scribble on paper was. And from a safety perspective, [00:17:00] I’ll know that something that says five milligrams is really five milligrams.

Dr. Yaft: Um, so there was a lot of excitement for the electronic medical record. But there’s still a lot of resistance, especially those at the tail end of their career, um, simply because it disrupted their workflow. They, instead of having a template that they could check off some boxes and write a couple notes, um, they had to sit down, start a note on a computer.

Dr. Yaft: And depending on their typing skills, it may have taken them much longer than they would on a paper chart. Uh, but there is a lot of benefit to the electronic medical record. But, flash forward, I actually worked on both paper charts and on the electronic medical record. Um, and I’ll tell you, as the years progressed, there have been more requirements to what you document in the chart.

Dr. Yaft: So the notes got longer and longer and longer. really taking away from time with the patient at the [00:18:00] bedside. And so the vast majority of my day when I’m seeing patients is in front of the computer typing notes. I’d say it’s about two thirds of my day, um, placing orders. And there are a lot of benefits to having everything in one place accessible by all the other physicians, nursing providers, ancillary staff. But at the same time, your whole day is centered around. How do I get the information on the chart? Uh, so that learning curve piece, it took a lot of folks to get used to having a workflow that works for them. You know, they made their own templates in the electronic medical record. They created their own order sets.

Dr. Yaft: So things got smoother. Um, but from a regulatory perspective, some of what’s driving the billing habits and what gets documented, um, is really what made that, um, that component of the E. M. R. Really [00:19:00] not as exciting anymore. Um, so you sort of get into what’s the next step in medicine? And there’s a lot of buzz around A.

Dr. Yaft: I. And How things can be automated and what can be saved from administrative tasks to clinical documentation. So I think we’re at the excitement phase. Um, but I think there’s still more to come in terms of implementation and what regulatory changes are set to happen.

Erik Sunset: Oh, yeah. And especially around AI, there’s not a whole lot of consumer protection laws on the books from AI. And I’m not necessarily hoping we get a bunch of them, but, you know, healthcare is the next level. A lot of lawyers, very litigious society. I would imagine that will come before any sort of broad consumer protection laws around AI.

Erik Sunset: But one thing that, uh, I’d love your opinion on when you look at [00:20:00] the most trusted source for health IT reviews, in my mind, that’s class research, and we’ll put a link to this in the show notes, but KLAS research, they, they collect, uh, user feedback, they talk to the vendors and it’s really a close partnership between class and a given.

Erik Sunset: Health IT vendor, pick your favorite EHR supplier and they’re probably a class partner. But the thing that sticks out to me is that year after year after year when they release the best in class ratings on a scale of zero to 100, the best in class winners for EHRs are like a B minus. 83 84. You might really have a great set of reviews in a year.

Erik Sunset: You might top 85. That’s not that good. Uh, in the grand scheme of things. What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Yaft: Uh, I think the, the attribution to that is sometimes you add so many bells and whistles. That it completely hampers your workflow, [00:21:00] or you may have things that maybe only a fraction of your providers are using, but it still changes the layout. It still changes where you may go to search for things. Um, I’d say just the day to day management.

Dr. Yaft: You may get some really great new features, but there’s always going to be with any of these health record upgrades. There’s always going to be a challenge of new learning, potential for mistakes. Um, and I’d say a good example is some of the features that may get put in to an electronic medical record that say, you know, I noticed you ordered this CT two months ago.

Dr. Yaft: Do you still want it? Um, which will is good in a way because you’re trying to reduce cost and duplicate imaging. That’s not necessary. But at the same time, the patient’s back in the hospital and you need that repeat CT scan. Um, it can also be an [00:22:00] annoyance, especially if it stops your workflow. It asks you too many questions.

Dr. Yaft: So there are things that I think you’re doing the right thing. But at the same time, you could be impeding workflows. Or or add the potential for air. So a lot of times I think physicians will get to a point where they get all of these indicators, uh, that lead to something called alarm fatigue and they may click through things that are actually very important. Um, there’s a recent case here at my facility.

Dr. Yaft: Where the patient had a drug allergy, but the, uh, discharging physician, the infectious disease physician and the pharmacist, it was a perfect model of a swiss cheese model where everything sort of fell through the holes, um, and ended up having a significant reaction to an antibiotic that they shouldn’t have been on because everybody clicked through it. Um, so I think those are the opportunities is. That we can have [00:23:00] with new technology that really is a true aid or co pilot, um, that aids the physicians, uh, helps their workflows, minimizes the time spent in front of a computer. Um, and gets to a point where it’s protective, but then you go into the regulatory component of who bears what responsibility for anything that is, um, abnormal, inappropriate, not the right information, clinically incorrect.

Dr. Yaft: Um, I think it still falls on the physician to make sure that the information, uh, being reviewed by, let’s say, this AI tool is accurate and doesn’t impact or impede clinical safety or patient care.

Erik Sunset: Yeah. And what you said around alarm fatigue with, uh, the right developers, you know, in my mind, easy for me to say, cause I’m not at an EHR vendor anymore, but with the right, if then sequencing, you can kind of program your [00:24:00] way around that with enough logic, right? Easier said than done. But what you can’t program your way around is the regulation.

Erik Sunset: And this is going to be going back 15 years now to Meaningful Use Stage 1. But I remember having clients that are pediatricians. Yelling at me, their EHR vendor, why am I asking a four year old child their smoking status?

Dr. Yaft: Right.

Erik Sunset: On the whole though, that’s just leading to burnout. That’s not the alarm fatigue end of it. This is just burnout driven by regulation and to be frank, it’s killing the profession. You see it in the data. There are way less physicians in the U. S. that we need to treat the number of patients that we have.

Erik Sunset: So you have the wrong thing happening. Less physicians, more patients, you know, at an age where they need more care. What can we do about that?

Dr. Yaft: So, when I talk to my colleagues about burnout, um, many of them, their burnout is not, you know, long hours in the hospital, though for some that’s likely a [00:25:00] contribution. The burnout is. Can I get through my day smoothly and make it feel like I’m making an impact on patients? really what it is. Um, and the piece of, um, when you look at different generations, I think the different values of different generations definitely align where there is more of an emphasis on work life balance, um, and newer generations going into medicine where the time spent really does matter.

Dr. Yaft: But those that have been in the profession for some time, it’s, Is my day valuable, uh, even if I’m here saying an extra four patients because they need me and the ER is busy, that sometimes helps with burnout because you feel a fulfillment to your call, um, but by and large, it’s a workflow piece, you know, can I get through my day without it being choppy, um, and take care of [00:26:00] my patients in a way that I’m trained to do and what I’m knowledgeable to do, and I think any resource that Aids in that for physicians, uh, is going to be a huge win the other side of burnout for physicians.

Dr. Yaft: Um, has to do with the information or disinformation that a lot of patients and customers tend to, uh, obtain. And so it tends to be a, you know, I don’t trust you as my health care provider, so I question you and I’m going to ask all these questions of things that I think I’m knowledgeable about, but I really don’t have the full story.

Dr. Yaft: Um, and at that front, that does. That really pushes a lot of providers, I think, out of the profession because it adds to that time. That’s not meaningful. Um, although many of these patients are really just looking for comfort, they want somebody to give them answers. But I think it’s it’s a challenging [00:27:00] environment when you’re going into those conversations.

Dr. Yaft: with a lack of trust. And, uh, if you take away some of the administrative tasks and time spent in front of a computer, maybe you can spend that extra time to build trust, have that face time with patients, engage them a bit more, and not have to worry about, you know, Oh, I got to go chart for several hours after this.

Erik Sunset: Yeah, that’s brutal. The pajama time charting, the missing family events, the charting on the weekends, that seems like such a self inflicted error. But at this point, with where the curves are for physicians who are practicing versus patients needing more care as they get older. It’s like too little, too late, uh, not that we wouldn’t want to fix all of your charting and, and documentation workflow issues, but there’s a bigger picture item that we’re not going to graduate enough, uh, medical school students to fulfill the need, like we’ll never catch up with current graduation rates.

Erik Sunset: So if you [00:28:00] had a magic wand, what would you do to fix that?

Dr. Yaft: I’d say the profession has to look at ways to. partner with patients, payers, health systems that make care more meaningful, better access. And when you talk about access, it’s not necessarily, you know, it’s taking me six months to get into a specialist. It’s really about how can new graduating physicians have a little bit more support to care for some of these patients.

Dr. Yaft: while allowing the specialist to be specialist. What I hear from my specialist colleagues is there are many times that, um, primary care physicians may be referring patients due to patient demand. I want to see a cardiologist. I want to see a pulmonologist, even though there may not be a reason. And it goes back to [00:29:00] that time spent.

Dr. Yaft: Did the, did the physician take the time to explain the reason why they wouldn’t need to see a specialist? So I think we get to a point where patients are maybe pushing for a lot of their care. I saw this drug on a commercial. I really want it or I really think I need to see a GI specialist. I don’t feel like I’m getting answers from you.

Dr. Yaft: So I think it goes back to how do we get physicians to build trust, to actually want to stay in the primary care lane, which used to be 20, 30 years ago, a lot of physicians wanted to go into primary care, uh, because specialties were a lot more, they’re, um, longer from a residency perspective. They didn’t have as much time with their family, but now a lot of primary care physicians.

Dr. Yaft: are stuck charting on the weekends, um, having difficult conversations with patients and their family that don’t necessarily result in quality of care. And so I think maybe [00:30:00] changing the medical school model, uh, emphasizing how do we reshape primary care. So it’s, not fragmented. How do we have a little bit less siloed care in medicine?

Dr. Yaft: Um, and how do we aid our physicians to have resources to spend more time?

Erik Sunset: What a nice segway you set me up there with, uh, cause I want to talk about AI and healthcare next. Uh, a lot of news. We’ve referenced it a few times. There’s a lot of different applications, even for AI and healthcare, from embedding LLMs into EHRs to more diagnostic tools that can aid a radiologist, say, in identifying something on a, on an image.

Erik Sunset: What are you seeing? What’s cool? Are we going in the right direction? What’s on your horizon?

Dr. Yaft: There’s a lot of, um, really unique opportunities, I’d say, from imaging modalities, um, to identification of, nodules that they’ve [00:31:00] measured, uh, AI generated tools that look at screening for lung cancer. Um, That, you know, radiologists may have tons of images to go through, um, but may not have seen or captured a lung nodule that was suspicious because their workflow is such and they need to continue to move on because they’re monitoring a busy ER and they got a lot of imaging studies and they got to spit out those reports.

Dr. Yaft: So again, on that front is how do you provide a resource for busy radiologists that helps them get through their workflow, potentially generate some, uh, preliminary reads for some of these cases. Um, and allow them to augment their own workflow. So I think that’s exciting and maybe an exciting time for radiologists as well to say, Hey, I can actually take on, you know, busy organizations, big ER, busy ERs, uh, and help get the, um, the stat reads that are [00:32:00] necessary for those sick patients.

Dr. Yaft: quickly because I’m not bogged down. So I think that that’s an exciting time. What we’re also seeing is generative A. I. Being used and, uh, progress notes and discharge summaries, uh, taking clinical documentation and capturing the right diagnoses in the chart. Maybe even nudging the physician say, Hey, you know, I noticed this potassium levels three.

Dr. Yaft: Do you want to add this as a new diagnosis? and also add, you know, supplemental potassium to get that number looking better. Um, so I think that’s a really exciting time. Those are ways that I think reduce friction for the patient. Um, they can also potentially, uh, impact patient quality and safety, which is great.

Dr. Yaft: Um, so those are two things that I really see as very advantageous, um, along with all of the, uh, ambient listening support that we’re now seeing, um, both on the inpatient [00:33:00] outpatient side of just giving more, uh, eye contact to the patients. Patients like it. They feel like they’re being heard, listened to. I think it goes back to building a little bit more trust.

Erik Sunset: Yeah, I think those are all great things coming down the pike. Um, kind of interestingly about this time last year, there was some really A sort of insane thesis being published online that there is going to be a future where all healthcare is AI powered and there’s just going to simply be a clinician in the background signing off on scripts and you won’t have to talk to a doctor.

Erik Sunset: I don’t think anybody, any healthcare consumer that I know was hoping for that outcome. It’s a very loud minority, you know, for this physicianless healthcare system with the exception of rubber stamping scripts. What’s your feedback been with patients though, we’re either discussing an AI workflow tool or AI in general.

Dr. Yaft: So I’ll give a, [00:34:00] uh, funny example. Back in medical school, you could take the medical student, um, the intern, the resident, and the attending, um, all individually go talk to the same patient and come back with four different stories. Um, so a lot of AI is only as good as what you give it. Um, and the information you feed it can really change or alter the direction of What potential diagnosis it may give you, uh, which not may not always be accurate.

Dr. Yaft: And so I think serving as a resource to, uh, physicians is really going to be valuable from a time perspective and sort of, um, balance the piece of, you know, this information that this automated resource may be telling you something that’s inaccurate and how many times have we Um, use a a I like [00:35:00] tool that we’re not even aware of online, whether it was chat, GPT or, um, any automated service on the phone.

Dr. Yaft: And you’re just like, that is not what I’m saying. And it’s not listening to you, but it’s giving you information as if it’s accurate. Um, and there are a lot of, you know, small examples of people who play around on chat GPT. and give different responses or sort of, um, communicate in a way that is trying to prompt a response that’s incorrect and you get really quite comical answers.

Dr. Yaft: So will it be a resource? Absolutely. Um, as far as replacement, I don’t see it in any near future. Um, it’s hard to predict what happens in 10, 20, 30 years with machine learning and how it advances. But in the interim, I think it’s going to serve as a resource.

Erik Sunset: I agree with you and I probably shouldn’t say this for posterity all the time on the podcast, but [00:36:00] unless LLMs can figure out a way to have a lawyer less existence, then we’re certainly going to have physicians as a part of care for them. That’s in pretty bad taste, but I know my listeners will forgive me there. Uh, Dr. Yaft, did we, uh, gloss over anything or, uh, fail to cover a topic you wanted to hit?

Dr. Yaft: Uh, no, that, that, uh, pretty much covers it as a very enjoyable dialogue as usual. And so great to talk to you and, um, look forward to any future discussions.

Erik Sunset: Oh, absolutely. Thanks for lending your perspective, uh, to the show here. Before we go, how can listeners connect with you online?

Dr. Yaft: Uh, best way to find me or connect with me would be on LinkedIn, uh, just first name and last name, John Yaft, and you should be able to find me on LinkedIn, uh, happy to engage in any messaging or potential meetings.

Erik Sunset: That sounds great. Of course, we’ll have a link to Dr. Yaffe’s LinkedIn in the profile. [00:37:00] Uh, the show notes rather. And on behalf of the entire DocBuddy team, I want to thank you for listening. Be sure you’re subscribed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, so you always get the newest episodes of the show.

Erik Sunset: Until next time, I’m your host, Erik. Talk to you soon.

Dr. Yaft: Thanks, Erik.