I was in New York when OpenAI launched ChatGPT 1.0.
I think that was 4 years ago, come this December, and the first thing I saw was a New York public school system banning the use of AI for students.
I laughed out loud with my son.
Callum has always been pretty technically aware, and as I looked at him, I thought, “Oh, this will be a revelation for you going forward”.
It was.
Moving on from that, the next thing that arrived on my horizon, or one of the next things, was AI note-taking services.
This was a reaction to the overwhelm of taking too many notes and feeling that if you didn't have notes, you were liable to lose your licence to practise in dentistry.
There was a period where my associates were coming to me almost every week with different AI note-taking structures, telling me this was the way forward.
What I decided to do then was look at AI note-taking a little bit like social media.
How quickly we run into this as fast as possible, not even considering any of the consequences.
To be clear, taking case notes for medicine or healthcare is important, but it's not more important than treating the patient properly, and it's not a shortcut.
And so in the end, as a practice, we did not take on board an AI note-taking system; we use the technology to ‘make us more human’, as we try to do everywhere.
We give the associates the opportunity to dictate all their case notes at the end of appointments and have them checked, typed and inserted into notes (I've been doing this for over 20 years).
It's not quite as efficient as the end note taking, but it's a lot more human.
It also allows us to limit the amount of case notes that go in because the important thing about case notes is being able to read them before the patient goes into surgery, and to let the AI collect your case notes, it doesn't care about this; it doesn't summarise it enough, and it produces volumes and volumes of ‘AI slop’ that nobody can read or pay attention to.
It's also worth remembering that we've moved away from the old medical-legal adage of,
Good notes, good defence.
Bad notes, bad defence.
No notes, no defence.
We've moved on to less is more.
What you need is concise, succinct case notes that you're able to explain in front of the judge should that ever happen (which it probably won't).
And so for us, what we did is we stepped back and looked very carefully at ways that AI might be able to help us going forward.
When we had our annual strategy day with our senior leadership team, we discussed budgets for AI and where we might spend money on the technology of AI to make us better and to free us up to look people in the face and have more conversations.
This is the route that we went down. The important thing now, when every single day you could have a new product that somebody who's technically more aware of you will sell you, is to have a plan.
The important thing about that plan is not to let ChatGPT write it.
Decide where it is you would like to be, or where your business would like to be, 3 years from now.
Write a plan and try your very best to stick to that and execute it.
Obviously, the secret here is to be satisfied when you reach that 3-year mark.
This is the only way now, the only USP that is left.
Everything else is AI slop.
Back in the day, when I got diagnosed with my thyroid disease and I was trying to go and ride the Haute Route 5-day event in the Pyrenees, Alex supported me through that when no one could see. In the lead-up, he even pushed me up a hill.
He wrote a blog after that, which I've kept, and I'll never publish because I don't have guest bloggers here - sorry.
But I remember it, and I remember it well, and so what he said at the end of that was chapeau, and that is what cyclists say to each other out of respect, and when they are impressed.
So, chapeau, Alex.