CPD provider Medcast has built an AI CPD product which works with you as you’re doing your day to day clinical investigations, all inside market dominant PMS, Best Practice Premier.
Best Practice Software will announce at its annual user summit today that they’ve done a bit of due diligence and come up with a competitive offering to Medical Director’s deal with Praxhub.
The practice management software will soon offer CPD activities, monitoring and reporting within their practice management application BP Premier.
As a part of the initial deal, Medcast – which is one of the top three independent GP medical education content providers in the country (HealthEd and ThinkGP are the other two) – will directly deliver education activities, host Best Practice training activities (including onboarding) and do CPD monitoring and reporting from within the BP clinical desktop.
But the Medcast offering is set to deliver a lot more than access to traditional provider CPD inside a GP’s practice management system.
It has developed an AI integration query engine for its CPD which integrates with the workflow of a GP to generate CPD exercises directly related to the day-to-day clinical investigations a GP might do.
Once, a GP with a particular problem with a patient might have held onto the problem and later visited the internet to do some investigation and learning, outside a CPD environment.
With Medcast’s soon-to-be-released AI product, a GP will be able to enter a query inside BP into an AI query box, generate Australian-relevant clinical answers, summaries and articles complete with citations and linked references, and then earn educational activity and performance review CPD points on the fly.
The Medical Republic was shown various examples of queries which a GP might generate on a typical day.
Three queries used in our demonstration included:
- How do I initiate and titrate insulin in a 65yr old with an Hba1c of 9.5 taking metformin?
- How should I approach treating a patient who has diabetes, gout, chronic kidney disease and chronic heart failure?
- Can I bill nurse time when claiming an item 23
The first two queries delivered a summary followed by a structured learning article, complete with citations and references with links. It was the sort of answer you might see using one of the expensive commercial clinical database products like Up To Date or Clinical Keys.
If a GP reads the article, they are able to log 30 minutes of ‘educational activities’ CPD which is tracked and eventually can be automatically reported to the RACGP.
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The article can also generate questions to complete so ‘reflecting on practice’ points can be achieved as well. The application will log the investigation and its progress and remind a GP so if they see the patient again so they can apply their learnings in a live setting and get ‘measuring outcomes’ CPD.
The application does a lot of automated stuff in the background like recording completed CPD units, adding up time for each CPD type and even auto-reporting some of the activity directly to the RACGP via an API.
Cofounder of Medcast Dr Stephen Barnett told The Medical Republic that the real value of the application was that it was integrating with the actual day-to-day problems and issues that a GP experiences and linking relevant learning to those problems.
“It’s a process that is all about quality improvement in practice but using issues and problems directly relevant to the day-to-day practice of a GP,” he said.
Medcast has been developing the product, called Mia (Medical Intelligent Assistant) for the last two years.
They are soft launching the application with select BP Premier users this year and are planning a full launch to all users next year.
Until now only Medical Director had access directly to CPD inside the PMS application via a partnership with Praxhub (you can check that out HERE).
But this application feels like it is a generationally different CPD product for Australian doctors in its ability to integrate with and work with the problems a GP faces in their particular clinic and location.
This new AI enabled CPD application will potentially challenge traditional CPD learning models, which are largely static and often not associated directly with the quality improvement of a particular GP working in a particular practice with particular interests.
For Medcast, being inside BP Premier will also give them a big distribution advantage over Praxhub given that BP Premier is generally thought to hold about 70% of the GP market these days.
Dr Barnett told TMR that, theoretically, a GP could now do all 50 hours per year of their CPD within the application, but that GPs would probably still be doing different types of learning to make up all their hours such as live events or online webinars.
The Medcast application will also offer all Medcast’s traditional online learning modules for BP Premier doctors, which will be surfaced though contextual search when a GP is looking for an answer to a question on Mia.
Dr Barnett said that the idea for the product came from some research they had done on how GPs searched for information in the context of their regular consulting activities – they found that GPs would do online research up to 15 times a day during the course of their work – and on some AI CPD products which are starting to emerge out of the US.
In the US, the two major commercial clinical reference products are Up to Date and Clinical Keys (Reed Elsevier). Both now have rapidly developing AI learning overlays on their data sets which allow for expedited workplace contextual learning.
Both groups are, like all the major AI players, adding relevant free data sets to their pool of AI accessible material, and in some instances, are entering into partnerships with relevant other clinical data providers, with a view to becoming one stop shops, and to potentially become the major clinical data aggregators on top of their long term reference material.
Medcast has been working over the last 18 months with key providers of Australian relevant clinical data sets to add them to the Mia. Dr Barnett says that an important differentiating feature of Mia is that the data sets are all directly Australian relevant and approved – stuff like all locally available clinical guidelines, other key clinical reference material and even the MBS data.
“There are loads of resources freely available online,” he said
“At the moment overseas AIs are just ‘hoovering’ them up. We are going through the front door and asking for consent (which complies with Australian copyright laws).
“So basically we are curating the best of these resources, asking consent, and making them available via Mia. We are also working with some closed data sources as with appropriate consents these could be included.”
Two key groups Medcast is working with on content development include the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and the RACGP.
Another interesting feature of Mia, according to Dr Barnett, is that you can configure it to operate in a very practice-specific manner by loading things like your own practice policies and procedures.
“In this way, not just the doctors are going to find Mia useful, admin staff will be able to use it as well to fast track things like patient admin and billing issues,” he said.
In the respect of the latter, Mia has the entire MBS loaded into it complete with updates.
Dr Barnett said that because of the AI learning nature of the project it was likely to always be a work in progress and iterating new functions.
“With enough of the right Australian centric data sets it could one day form the basis of a local clinical decision support product, but that may be still some way off yet given all the work everyone has to do on AI guardrails”.
