Say hi to your virtual attending

Medical education uses an apprentice model. During medical school and post graduate training, residents and fellows are taught and trained by attending physicians or clinical academic faculty. The goal is to oversee and produce graduates who have the competencies to practice independently. Just don't expect one of those to be how to practice medicine using a viable business model.

An attending physician is an experienced medical doctor who is responsible for the overall care of a patient in a hospital or clinic setting. In a teaching hospital or academic medical center, attending physicians frequently lead and direct a group of medical students, interns and residents.

Here is your guide to color coded care so you can identify them.

The assumption is that the attending physician will bring state of the art practice to sites of care and stay abreast of advances, evidence-based guidelines, and standards of care. It also assumes they are good teachers.

The problem is medical and scientific information is doubling every 40-50 days and it is humanly impossible to digest it all. One solution is to create "virtual attendings" that students, trainees and clinicians can consult during their clinical careers. The benefits would be:

1. Personalized learning using large language search models that are transforming how we access actionable clinical information
2. It is constantly updated in real time
3. It adapts to a clinician's personal style of practice
4. It is targeted to specific use cases
5. It can be accessed on any mobile device anywhere at any time
6. It can be shared with other members of the care team or patient care community
7. It would award continuing medical education (CME) and maintenance of certification (MOC) credit for using it
8. It would be a useful medical education and training technology
9. It would augment or assist clinical decision making
10. It would help selecting the appropriate treatment plan
11. It would help attendings be better teachers by recommending pedagogical techniques
12. It would help attendings grade students and residents to satisfy accreditation and board certification requirements.
13. It might reduce stress and burnout
14. It would provide and integrate the costs of what you are prescribing or ordering
15. It would suggest more cost-effective treatments than what you had in mind

The virtual attending, however, is not a whole product solution, at least not yet. I mean who or what AI engine can you trust these days?

Whole Product Concept ?involves viewing your product as more than just a sum of its features, but rather as everything involved with the experience customers have with your product. To develop your?Whole Product Concept,?start at the core – what are the real benefits that your customers expect to receive or experience from the product? Then expand your thinking to consider all aspects of the customer’s experience, from purchase, first use, experienced usage, maintenance, add-ons and accessories, even to how the product may be replaced or upgraded. Consider all of the touchpoints your customer will have with your product.

The virtual attending lacks clinical judgement, does not have much of a sense of humor, has a sterile bedside manner and is not very good at doing surgery or teaching residents how to do various procedures in the clinic or the OR. Of course, in some instances, that's what we have now.

Yes, instructional videos, simulations and extended reality are useful educational tools. But I've watched many You Tube videos on how to improve your backswing and I still can't score in the 80's.

Having a guide at your side providing you with real-time, updated actionable clinical information and "news you can use" at the point of care is a good start and can make better, smarter attendings. It sure beats having to find this information on a website that only understands English, typing in your username and password (that you forgot or has been stolen), spending time finding what you need and then discovering the information is not applicable to the patient you are seeing at the bedside. It's like using the Comcast chatbot. Here are some of my other favorite business tricks.

Think Medscape, ePocrates or Up to Date 2.0

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs