The Doctor Will See You Now: How AI Is Transforming HCP Practices

PulsePoint’s annual HealthNEXT Summit focuses on the most pressing issues health marketers face today. This year’s summit, hosted in New York City, was a high-impact, single-day event where the industry’s top doers, thinkers, and innovators came together to discuss how health marketing is changing and what they can do to future-proof their strategies.

This post is part of a series of the top takeaways from each of the summit’s sessions, including expert-led panels and innovation breakouts.

The Key Takeaways for The Doctor Panel

For healthcare providers, one of the biggest challenges they face is a lack of time: How do they practice medicine and engage directly with patients while facing mountains of administrative work? AI is changing that, not by replacing physicians, but by giving them some of their time back to improve the patient encounter and improve the quality of care.

Moderated by Becky Hallam, GVP of Platform Solutions at PulsePoint, “The Doctor Will See You Now: How AI Is Transforming HCP Practices” featured a panel of providers sharing firsthand experiences with integrating AI into their daily workflows. These are the top takeaways.

1. Technology Is Advancing and Will Change Workflows Further 

When it comes to their day-to-day work, patient engagement looks slightly different for every physician, but for all of them, technology has changed the way they do their jobs, especially when it comes to access and administrative tasks such as document sharing and communication.

• “When I came I had a pager, so they used to page you to do things,” said Dr. Jaime Andres Londono, Associate Director of the Adult Transplantation and Cellular Therapy Program at Hofstra/Northwell Health. “Now you just have your phone, and you have an EMR in your phone. That makes a big difference in terms of taking care of the patients immediately.”
• Dr. Toral Vaidya, a board-certified dermatologist working with Kurbside Partners, practices the full range of dermatology, from chronic conditions to acute ones such as skin cancers. “I think there’s a lot of exciting conversations to be had about AI and how it can fit within my field,” she said.

Specifically, technology allows her to follow up with patients virtually who live in remote locations or rural areas, people who normally wouldn’t be able to see a dermatologist for months.

2. AI Is Already Part of Doctors’ Daily Workflows

AI applications are already starting to show up across clinical workflows, and even interactions with patients.

• According to Dr. Londono, there are three areas where he’s seeing AI applications show up: patients, physicians, and research. Patients are now using ChatGPT to help them understand test results. “In my institution, we have a lot of research going on in AI, in pathology reviews, in images for radiology,” he said, adding that the physicians also use clinical-based AI tools daily to help them quickly access information.
  

• “It’s a positive that people feel they can make an informed choice, but the issue I run into is, we don’t know all the sources that ChatGPT is pulling from,” Dr. Vaidya said, adding that “there is a way that we can use AI to help triage cases that maybe should be seen sooner compared to later.”
  
  
• Dr. Alexandra Gomez Arteaga, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director of Allogeneic Bone Marrow Transplant Service, Weill Cornell Medicine, said that AI tools have helped free up time for members of the physician’s team when it comes to administrative tasks such as writing a prior authorization letter, as well as for the patient who might be looking for basic information. “It’s a partner in terms of education,” she said. “In terms of research, it is a partner for thinking through and summarizing data.”

3. Incorporating AI Into Daily Medical Care

But is there a future where AI will drive meaningful portions of medical care? The panelists discussed certain patient needs that AI is well-suited to meet. 

Dr. Londono recalled a statistic: 25% of people with an OpenAI account look at healthcare-related content once per week. “That speaks of a need,” he said, noting that in medicine there is often significant asymmetry between what the doctor knows and what patients know. “We’re failing patients in terms they can actually understand, that they know what’s going on … that they can get access immediately to certain questions.”

Dr. Vaidya sees AI as filling an important role in decreasing time spent on administrative tasks that can currently take up 10–20% of a doctor’s day, but when it comes to clinical decision-making, she said there need to be further advancements for AI to take the place of a physician.

4. An Irreplaceable Human Connection

The patient–physician interaction is often built on trust and vulnerability. How does AI fit into that trust? The panelists considered the role of physicians in the future of patient interactions.

Dr. Gomez, who works in oncology, said “My patients become my patients for life.” Whether they do well with treatment or not, building trust and communication is something they have to work on daily. “That ideally should never be replaced by a computer. We are never going to train them to have the same empathy,” she said.

“Being sick is being human; it’s an inherently human thing. Humans get sick and humans will have to take care of them,” Dr. Londono said. On the other hand, “AI might have a big role in something we’re missing,” he said. “Prevention is something we are not good at. We see the end side of things … How can you prevent these things from happening? That would be a big shift in the healthcare system.”

5. Marketing to HCPs Using AI

Marketers can play a role in this technological change when it comes to reaching both HCPs and patients with treatment information, but it’s essential that this messaging be delivered in a natural way that works for doctors.

• “It’s going to be inevitable that patients want to have an informed choice before they even walk into our door,” Dr. Vaidya said.
  
  
• Dr. Gomez brought up the integration of information. “Right now, there’s a lot of high-level information, but it’s very separate.”
  
  
• There’s a big opportunity to reach the 25% of OpenAI users who ask health-related questions every week, Dr. Londono said. “That’s a good place to position your product, to position your services as long as it goes along with patient education.”

Although AI won’t replace providers anytime soon, the technology is already helping them decrease friction in their workflows, giving them more face time with patients and improving quality of care. Marketers can use these AI tools to deliver helpful messaging to HCPs in a timely way and in the most relevant contexts.

Keep an eye out for more posts diving into each of the topics we discussed at HealthNEXT 2026. Want to be involved in our next event? Contact the team here.