A Deeper Dive at Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and the Impact on Osteopathic Medicine-Webinar Recording

Video Transcription

Video Summary

This webinar explores the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, particularly its impact and opportunities within osteopathic medicine. Tim Tsai, a family physician and medical director at Stanford, highlights AI's rapid advancements and applications—such as ambient digital scribes reducing clinical documentation burden and AI-generated responses easing patient message overload. These tools aim to improve clinician efficiency and patient-centered care, aligning with osteopathic principles of whole-person care, upstream prevention, and enhancing the patient-physician relationship. Tsai also discusses potential AI uses in osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT), including gait analysis and biomechanical modeling.<br /><br />Bradley Thornock, a bioethicist and medical humanities professor, expands this perspective by emphasizing osteopathic medicine’s holistic philosophy, including the mind, body, spirit, and importantly, the social/community context. He critiques the tendency toward atomism—focusing solely on individual patients—and advocates for a communitarian approach recognizing patients as embedded in social networks. Thornock underscores AI as a powerful social technology that both reflects and shapes societal values but also presents risks due to its rapid, unpredictable growth. He calls on osteopathic medicine to lead collective actions ensuring AI ethics, transparency, liability, and equitable benefits, promoting patient and community welfare.<br /><br />Together, the speakers urge the osteopathic profession to adapt and expand its foundational philosophy to guide ethical AI integration, enhancing healthcare delivery while safeguarding social and humanistic values.

Keywords

artificial intelligence

osteopathic medicine

clinical documentation

patient-centered care

osteopathic manipulative treatment

bioethics

AI ethics