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DermGPT Looks to Improve Clinic Productivity for Dermatologists

<ѻý class="mpt-content-deck">— Faranak Kamangar on how the AI tool can be used in practice to make life easier for physicians
MedpageToday

The first-ever dermatology chatbot powered by proven, curated AI (artificial intelligence), DermGPT, was recently unveiled at a limited press briefing. Developed by Faranak "Fara" Kamangar, MD, a board-certified dermatologist based in Palo Alto, California, DermGPT aims to streamline clinical tasks, improve access to dermatologic data, and help save time for physicians.

In this exclusive ѻý video, Dr. Kamangar discusses the tool and how it can help dermatologists in practice.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

DermGPT is an AI chatbot and it's built on more than 3,000 peer-reviewed articles. So similar to the other learned language models, if you ask it a question, it's going to be more specific and reliable because it's pulling in from our data rather than maybe a generic ChatGPT -- where they basically took a quarter of the internet, threw it in there, and then when you ask it questions, sometimes it can have multiple types of errors, when you ask a general language model like that. When you have your own specific data, then it's a lot more reliable. There's sort of different types of errors where there's the specific -- it just gives you a wrong answer -- or there's the type two where it'll actually make something up that kind of sounds good, so what they call hallucinations. So it's a chatbot, but more [dermatology] and it gets rid of those types of errors. So just more reliable, most trustworthy.

And you can use it, it's been used for lots of use cases now. Prior authorizations, denial letters, residents are using it to study for boards, patient education handouts, pretty much anything where you want some [dermatology] verbiage to be created. Our staff is using it a lot to come up with... if patients have a question, they can come up with a draft for the physician to look at, which makes it a lot faster.

I see a lot of inflammatory skin disease in my practice. I'm fellowship trained too in psoriasis and eczema and immunotherapies and all the biologics. So I see a lot of that in my practice. So a lot of what we do is the prior [authorizations], the patient access, all the things around actually getting the medicines to the patients. So this type of technology is just going to be vital.

We really can't do it really well otherwise, we see a lot of private practice docs getting a little burnt out with the practice management piece. Some doctors are not offering these new therapies because it adds so much more work on the back end, and the patients lose out; they basically don't get access to medicines that are so cutting edge. And then a lot of times we'll end up... it's sort of what we call Healthcare 1.0 to Healthcare 5.0, which followed the tech revolution from 1.0 to 5.0. We have all this stuff now, but there are so many offices and patients that are still getting the 1.0 type of treatment, just because it's hard to get to the later thing. So this is just to kind of bridge that gap to just make life easier.

DermGPT is the site, and for dermatologists it's actually free to use, so they can sign up and there's no cost associated with it. So they can just sign up and start using it clinically.

I think AI is here to stay. It's basically, I think like telehealth where during COVID people are like, oh, is telehealth going to be around for a while? And we know now it is. AI is the same, it's here, it's going to stay, it's not going to take anybody's jobs either. That's something I hear sometimes from physicians. But I think it will replace... so people who use AI, I think, will replace people who are not using AI, if that makes sense.

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    Greg Laub is the Senior Director of Video and currently leads the video and podcast production teams.