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AI Will Slash Decades-Long Lag in Medical Adoption

It can take decades for new medical research to change what happens in the exam room. AI is going to massively accelerate this process. The dissemination of medical research into clinical practice is not slow because the science is slow. It is slow because it takes years for important original research to become part of clinical guidelines, but then, more importantly, it takes a very long time for providers to pick up and incorporate those guidelines into their practice. We have systems like conferences and CME, which help providers learn about the latest guidelines and incorporate them into their practice. But because it is mostly voluntary, and especially if you are not in an academic center, the implementation of the guidelines ends up being heterogeneous and unevenly distributed. You can imagine that some doctors might not change their practice to represent the latest guidelines for years. I have seen this firsthand, where a patient comes into the clinic or the hospital and is not on guideline-directed medical therapy. Academic centers try to move folks onto GDMT when they have a touchpoint, as long as there is not a good reason not to. As clinicians use AI as a collaborator when creating treatment plans and documentation, they are going to be using AI that has much higher than human awareness of the latest guidelines. This means that clinical guidance is going to reach patients not because their doctor went to a conference or did CME, but because the AI tool their doctor is using had access to that information. The dissemination of guidelines is going to get much better because of AI.