Technology Update in Dermatology

Dr Daniel Siegel discusses how artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are transforming dermatology practice—from ambient transcription to diagnostic support tools. Learn how clinicians can evaluate AI platforms for accuracy, integrate imaging and teledermatology solutions, and maintain HIPAA compliance and patient privacy in an evolving digital landscape.

Transcript

Hello, I'm Dan Siegel, Clinical Professor of Dermatology at the State University of New York at Downstate Medical Center and a former American Academy of Dermatology president.

What emerging technologies do you see having the greatest near-term impact on diagnostic accuracy and workflow efficiency in dermatology?

Dr Siegel: AI is probably the number one technology that will have a major impact on our practices over the next couple of years. AI has been advancing extremely rapidly and with technology such as ambient transcription, where you can be in a room with the patient and family members and everyone is speaking and the AI records and parses things into a standardized note format that is often better than what we can write. And in fact, it's better than what many of us do write because of the way we've become overly verbose with EMRs. As that becomes more widely used, I think notes will go back to being better and more useful.

As AI and smartphone-based tools become more prevalent, how can clinicians evaluate which innovations are truly ready for safe, everyday use?

Dr Siegel: I would suggest that when you look at AI tools, and there's a whole bunch of them, and I won't mention any because there's new ones every day, others disappear or they change their name. I would suggest starting with ones that are widely used and popular and have a couple of prompts that you've worked out that you know the answers to and ask the questions and see how good the answers are compared to your area of expertise. This is a great way to get a sense of if they're giving you the right answers. Look for ones that will give you a link that you can click on to actually look at the native reference source to make sure it's not been hallucinated. These are among many of the ways you can do things. And if you want to pick up a new hobby as I have, you can also try and push the medical AIs to see if you can make them function outside their guardrails because you can, that means somebody didn't make it secure enough. And remember, when you make an AI query, that query is going to live forever somewhere and it may be traceable. And remember, there's a lot more lawyers than there are doctors out there. So be careful.

What are some practical steps dermatology practices can take to integrate new tech—like clinical imaging platforms or teledermatology tools—while maintaining patient privacy and compliance?

Dr Siegel: The first thing you need to do is to be sure that the app or platform you're using is HIPAA compliant and make sure that the vendor and you have a contract because you want to protect yourself just as they want to protect themselves. Also, you should check to be sure that there are no surprises. For instance, that they're not using something that may have a backdoor. I always think of the classic backdoor as TikTok, which once you put TikTok on your phone, you have given access to everything on your phone to the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which is why there was an effort made to ban TikTok, which has at the moment been unbanned, which is, I think, a very bad thing. But you have to be careful, you have to be clear because remember, if you're taking pictures and you're leaving them in your regular phone photo file as opposed to a secure vault and you lose your phone, well, if you work for an institution and you don't report it and they catch you, not only will you pay penalties, you lose your job. If you know that one of your coworkers or one of your trainees or one of your bosses has lost their device that was not HIPAA compliant and you don't turn them in, you too will become a target for firing and other penalties. So you need to be sure everybody's playing by the same rules. If you are in training or you're in private practice, but you have hospital privileges, before you bring your new camera to take pictures of the patient in the hospital setting, make sure that you're not only following the rules that you know are correct, but make sure you're following the institution's rules, which may be stricter than the ones you otherwise might be following. It's a brave and strange new world, and you have to play by all of those rules.