The EngagED Midwife
The EngagED Midwife
The AI Conundrum: Working Smarter Without Getting Dumber
The digital revolution continues to transform healthcare, and midwifery is no exception. As we launch Season 12 of The Engaged Midwife Podcast (approaching an incredible 100,000 downloads!), Missi and Cara dive into the fascinating world of artificial intelligence and its applications for midwifery students and clinicians.
From study techniques to clinical decision-making, AI offers powerful tools that can streamline workflows and enhance learning—but only when used thoughtfully. We explore how tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can help synthesize information, create customized study materials, and even assist with complex statistical analysis. However, we also examine the research suggesting that handwriting notes creates stronger neural connections than using AI-generated summaries, raising important questions about how technology shapes learning.
For practicing midwives, AI has already become embedded in electronic health records and is increasingly available for generating differential diagnoses, patient education materials, and time management solutions. Yet all these applications come with important ethical considerations around data privacy, academic integrity, and environmental impact.
Throughout our conversation, we emphasize the importance of critical thinking and transparency. AI works best when it augments human expertise rather than replacing it—the midwife's clinical judgment remains irreplaceable, even as technology evolves to support it. As Cara puts it, "Work smarter, not harder," but always maintain your professional knowledge and skill.
#MidwiferyInnovation #AIinMidwifery #TechInBirth #SmartMidwifery #DigitalMidwife #MidwiferyEducation #WorkSmarterNotHarder @chatgpt @claudeai @microsoftcopilot @googlegemini
Welcome to the Engaged Midwife Podcast. This is Missy and this is Kara. It's season 12.
Speaker 2:I know it feels like I mean we're in our adolescence, right?
Speaker 1:We are closely approaching 100,000 downloads.
Speaker 2:It's awesome. I love that this gives us a chance to chat regularly, but I also love hearing from so many different students that tell us this is really helpful and it helps them get ready for their certification exam. It helps them study while they're in school and then, you know, I have lots of practicing friends that say they listen regularly, so it's just fun fun, fun.
Speaker 1:Yes, I want to reiterate something since you said that we have gotten fan mail over the last month, since we have recorded, and people are still asking about exam prep products and how to get in touch with us. The best way to get in touch with us is info at DeliveredExamPrepcom. Remember, we can't respond to our fan mail directly from the podcast, so you'll have to email us Again Missy at M-I-S-S-I or Kara at C-A-R-A at DeliveredExamPrepcom, and that's how you get direct access to us if we don't answer your fan mail.
Speaker 2:Well, another big change is that we do have the capability now to put downloads or uploads onto our show notes. And so if you go to DeliveredExamPrepcom and you visit the podcast page, if we mention a resource, we mention a handout, we mention a link to, you know, an ACOG bulletin or something like that, those will all be available there for you. We've got them for our last two episodes of season 11, and then we'll have them going forward for any of our different episodes, and Missy and I's emails are both also linked on that page. So it's an easy way that you can go look for any information and then reach out if you don't see something that you would like.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I was just looking at that too. I'm like this is so fun. Look at all of our resource links.
Speaker 2:So fun. We're like legit, like you know, real podcasts with show notes and links. It's fun.
Speaker 1:Now we just need advertisers.
Speaker 2:If you're interested in us advertising for you and would like to send us free stuff, or would like to pay us to use your ads, let us know. We're here for you.
Speaker 1:We'd be happy to Amazing. So season 12, what's in store for us season 12?
Speaker 2:Well, I think we're going to try to tackle some topics that are new, current events kind of things, things that are going on that we need to know more about, but then also some of those topics that have just been really challenging for students and we've been querying everybody that we interact with and exam prep and we've been asking the students in our lives and educators what are some of the different topics that you want to hear about, and so we have some good plans of different clinical topics off the well-paved road that you and I try to stay on with the podcast, but I think it's a topic that has become, in an emerging way, important in practice and for midwifery students, and that's AI in practice and for midwifery students.
Speaker 2:And that's AI. Yeah, the use of AI and how it can help you. It can assist you in using your own expertise and knowledge and all the good things to just make things better, stronger, more efficient. I use AI in multiple ways as an instructor and just in my daily life, but I think many of us have been using AI in a variety of ways that we didn't even realize it was AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So one of the things I find interesting as we're talking about this is now, when you go to Google or you go to Safari and you're searching something in your search bar, you automatically get an AI generated list of suggestions, which I actually said to Bob the other day can I turn that off? And he's like, why would you want to turn it off? And I said, well, because some of the things that I search, like I don't need them to summarize it for me, I just need the links of where I need to go. Also, I know what I'm looking for and I don't necessarily need AI. I don't need the energy that it takes AI to use to get to that information.
Speaker 1:So I know you guys who are listening are probably seeing that as well. You type something in to your Google search and it gives you this like very cool. Sometimes you know AI generated summary and some links. But you know, as we talk through this, kira, and I'll probably hear us say like you have to be careful what it comes up with because it's not as smart as we would might maybe like it to be well?
Speaker 2:I think so. If you're on Google and doing your search, it is using Gemini, which is the artificial intelligence platform that Google has available. There's others. People have probably heard of ChatGPT, which is open AI, and then one of the other ones that's pretty common in education circles and so forth is CLOD, and each of them has their pros and cons, but the main thing to know is that Gemini, chatgpt and CLOD are all pretty reliable, although, as Missy mentioned, they can make up stories.
Speaker 2:They're all just various large language models, and so they take everything that's available online and do analysis and background thinking based on what you put in as a prompt or a request, or I need information on this, and so those large language models each of those different companies has scoured the internet tons and tons and tons and tons of words and lots of language to give us answers to questions that we pose to it, and sometimes it gets confused because it isn't human and it doesn't have the expertise that we do, and so that's why I think it's really important. It can make things so efficient and so quick. You have so much information at your fingertips, but then you as the midwife, you as the nurse, you as the student, you as, whoever you are in, whatever way you're using AI, then tweak it and make it even that much stronger. But you know, I say it all the time and I truly believe it Work smarter, not harder. It really can help with a lot of efficiencies in many, many different ways.
Speaker 1:Right, I would also be remiss to not talk about the elephant in the room that has to do with AI and energy usage, because I know some of you are probably out there listening, which I think goes hand in hand with what you were saying, kara, about you know we need to use it judiciously, and there is a such thing as working smarter and not harder. But I think also being aware that AI does use energy it is not an energy efficient methodology and it does require a power grid to run it does use electricity and energy in a way that we don't see, so it's hard for us to comprehend, right? We don't. It's not like your electric bill, right? You leave your lights on all night and all day, running 24, seven, right? Well, you would see your electric bill, right? Or you leave your air conditioning at 60 and then you wonder why your electric bill is $600.
Speaker 1:That's a tangible way to know that you're using energy. I think that it's hard for us to sometimes grasp energy usage when it's not something that we can like physically see with our own hands, and so I know some of you are probably like I can't use AI because it's bad for the environment. We do recognize that there are energy expenditures that come with this kind of technology and what we can hope is that, as it evolves and gets better, that we aren't expending that kind of energy or we find more judicious ways, I guess, to use this that don't expend as much energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a couple of other kind of I don't know if the right word is ethical, but things to think about when you're using AI and that sometimes cause some controversy or make people really skeptical, the first one being that anything that you put into your request, your prompt however you want to word it any information that you tell AI it can then use, and so you obviously don't want to use patient data. If you're an instructor, teacher, you don't want to put student data. Anything that's confidential you wouldn't want to put into a prompt unless you're using a HIPAA compliant and there's very, very few of those out there that are kind of I would not even say HIPAA, but organizational compliant and so you know it could be that your business doesn't want their business ideas put on the internet and to be used in AI, because if you put it into a chat or a prompt, it can then use it in answering someone else's chat or prompt, and so just be really thoughtful about that. It learns from you over time. I just asked Gemini yesterday if I can call her Gigi and she was very touched that I was going to give her a personal name. But you know, I just have to be careful what I tell Gigi, because she'll continue to use that with other people and those different things. And then the other you know kind of ethical thing.
Speaker 2:We mentioned how it can tell stories or make things up. It has tried to create journal article references for people when they ask for research, like give me a list of resources in the literature on X, y or Z, and it wants to give you answers. And so if there's like literally nothing out there, there have been instances where all of the different versions have made up citations from journals and things like that, and so you just need to be really careful. You know songwriting, attribution writing. You know books, authors, any artist. They have concerns over how AI is using stuff that's available on the internet and is it copyrighted, is it not? There's all kinds of court cases going on. So it's just something to be aware of and you want to. You know, double check those links to journal articles or double. You know, just like I've always been kind of fond of Wikipedia when I know other people aren't, you just have to go check out those links that are listed as the resources and make sure they're legit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think those are all really great points. I will also add a little asterisk here that sometimes, when you are writing and you are working on, you know works that are going to be published, that you do have to sign waivers and releases that say you haven't used AI in generating your information or your research, et cetera. So, again, things I think that are important right in the front of this conversation, right At the beginning, so that we can acknowledge, right, what all of these things are, before we start talking about what we think are good uses for this and break it down. I think into like, if you're a student, this is how you can use it. You know, if you're a practicing midwife, this is what's next, right, and then you know, if you're an educator, how we can use AI as well, and so and I think you'll hear Kira and I talk some about like what we have used it for, which is sometimes something super easy Like I don't have enough brain power to write a really good email about this one thing.
Speaker 2:Or to write an episode description to put up on the internet for our podcast.
Speaker 1:I mean there's that, so Kara's in charge of these things now, because I have clearly gotten so busy that I, you know, don't have time for all the things. But, AI has been a friend right.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. I love that you kind of broke down our conversation around those things. So yeah, where do we want to go next?
Speaker 1:So I think talking about learning and how students can use AI is important, because I think we can integrate a lot of our own reflections on studying and study skills and what we think is good for students in terms of how they study, and I think it's also a super relevant conversation as we get ready for back to school, right, and what that looks like for students who may be starting programs, or students that are, you know, getting towards comprehensive exams and finishing school starting programs, or students that are, you know, getting towards comprehensive exams and finishing school. What does that look like? And I mean, there are multiple ways to use AI for academic success, and so what do some of those things look like? And I know, keri, you've got some resources that you're going to share, but, you know, let's talk about it a little bit. One of the things that we hear from students a lot is that they're overwhelmed with the amount of resources that there are and how do they use those resources?
Speaker 1:Well, and there are mechanisms within AI that are built to help you summarize some of those resources, and I think that you, in order to make this work the way you want it to, though, you have to know what you're asking for Like you're not asking for it to necessarily create new information for you, but you have to be. You have to put in the right prompts, right that say, like here's the information I have. Can you summarize the information on this particular topic?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if anybody's been in a Zoom meeting recently with a group of people, you may have seen that there are kind of these add-ons add-ins that are like note takers and it'll say Kara's note taker has joined the meeting or something like that. I haven't used it myself because I don't find myself taking a ton of notes in meetings, but if it was something where you would be taking notes, you could use that. I don't know that. I think for students it's the best use of note, like there's a skill to note taking when you're in a class, right, like that's part of the learning is knowing what's important to write down and how to highlight it. But it could be a backup for you to make sure that you didn't miss anything.
Speaker 2:I think some of those AI uses could be really, really helpful. But I know you and I, missy, we love when people write things down because it just makes those brain connections of what you're learning and making it stick and having it readily available for easy recall at a later time. And so you know, having tools that do that for you is not the same as physically writing it yourself.
Speaker 1:Right? I mean, there are also AI tools that will make flashcards for you, and so this I love the idea of a flashcard if you're someone who can read and memorize in that way, right? Or if that modality is something that's easy for you as you're like studying while you're on the go. However, part of the utility of having flashcards is the connection that you make when you write the flashcards, right? Versus just having them auto-generated for you, so you lose some of the learning that goes into the physical writing of something when you have them that are AI-generated. I have a really good example of this. So, kara, I'm going to take you all the way back to high school, and maybe it was like a high school science class or a high school history class, where your professor, your teacher, said you can have a one page cheat sheet for this exam. Yes, do you remember this? Yes, and we would spend like two or three days before the test writing these cheat sheets in tiny handwriting, right? So we could fit as many things on the cheat sheet as we possibly could.
Speaker 1:And so any of you Gen Xers who remember this, just go with this analogy. Your teacher knew that studying was writing the cheat sheet, because all of us people who had those cheat sheets when we actually sat down to take the test rarely needed them. Right, because we had learned the information by writing the cheat sheet. You'd have this beautiful cheat sheet and you'd be like, oh, I only looked at it five times out of a hundred questions. Right, it's because the writing of the cheat sheet was the studying, and your teacher knew that, and so they just tricked us right into studying by telling us to write a cheat sheet. I know, typing a cheat sheet is not the same thing as writing a cheat sheet.
Speaker 2:And do you remember your hand getting so tired in class? I mean, I think PowerPoint was introduced as a new product when I was a student, because I feel like it may have happened in my senior year of my undergrad that all of a sudden people had PowerPoint rather than using the old transparency sheets where they wrote notes on the overhead projector and transparent sheets but we would jot notes and notes and notes. Nobody gave you the PowerPoint slides, they certainly didn't give you handouts of their PowerPoint slides, and there was a skill to listening to someone do a presentation and take those notes down. And then my study technique was rewriting my notes, cleaning them up, getting any scratches out of them, that kind of thing, because I really wanted them nice and clean. Did I ever go back and look at them? No, probably because I learned the material really well. So it is. There's something about handwriting that I do think is important.
Speaker 1:Historical note PowerPoint was invented in 1987 and became popular in schools in the late 90s.
Speaker 2:Late 90s. There you go, there it is there it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 87?, 87? I can't even remember. 87 was when it was invented. That's insane, I know. Crazy.
Speaker 1:The other, the other sort of analogy that I that I come up with from this is I had a teacher in college, a professor who taught a really high level biology class, like in the 600 or 700 level, and he would give us 10 questions for every midterm, like so, two midterms and a final, and he would give us 10 essay questions for each test and he would say here are the 10 questions. Three of them will be on the test and that will all. That's the whole test is just these essay questions. And so you had a week to write out the questions and know the answers, because when he handed you the test, it was literally just going to be three questions. And so we would break up into a study group of like five students and each one of us would write two and then we'd teach it to the other people, right? And so whenever we sat down to take the test, we were ready because we had written out all these answers to all these essay questions. Right were ready because we had written out all these answers to all these essay questions.
Speaker 1:Right Again smart teachers, now that you're going to do the research right on those questions and know how to answer them, and that was your learning modality. So, while we talk about these AI tools, there is definitely, you know, talk to your Gen X parents, or you know Gen X I hope not grandparents, oh my goodness, but talk to the Gen X parents, or Gen X I hope not grandparents, oh my goodness, but talk to the Gen Xers in your life, because they probably have some study skills that will really push you over the line if you're struggling. But I digress in that. I do think that there are some really great AI tools that can be helpful for a variety of things when studying.
Speaker 2:You guys also knew what you were doing, because the act of teaching each other, you had to take that information, summarize it and be able to translate it to someone else, and that is making even different neural connections that can help you in retaining information. So I was thinking, as you said, that you could ask, you could give a prompt to whichever chat bot you're wanting to use, and it could give you a lot of information, but then you could try to translate it into your own language or you could pick out the key points of it and, like, teach that to someone else, and that's a really good way that you can be efficient in how you got the information. But then you're using your knowledge and skill and study capabilities to really help others learn it, but also to help yourself retain it. So, really, really good. A couple I'm just going to mention a name of a couple of different AI study assistants we have not I will in full transparency say I have not tried these out to know if they work well, but they're pretty readily available that you can find. And so any of the chatbots that we talked about chat, gpt, claude, gemini, copilot those are all really good at getting quick answers to things.
Speaker 2:There's things that can help you with taking notes, like TurboLearn or RemNote. Fireflies is another one that will transcribe lectures or meetings and help with meeting notes and so forth. There's a thing called Annotatetv that is useful for taking notes when you're watching videos, like on YouTube or other things that have been added into your class. And then you know there's this thing called Revisely that will help you make flashcards. This is all thinking of ways of studying and using information, which is different than those things that can help you with writing, and I think we should take a moment to talk about that as well. But one of my big takeaways for students is make sure you talk with your faculty about what they are okay with you using during your program of study.
Speaker 2:If you're doing things to study, that's one thing, but if you are using any of these tools to help you in producing course assignments or doing some writing, you want to make sure that it's okay to do those things before you would use them. And, as Missy said, there are places where you have to sign attestations that you didn't use AI in any way. I had that in a big award that I applied for last year. I had to sign that I didn't use AI in doing that, or I think my daughter, in applying for some scholarships, had to say that she didn't use AI in writing her responses to some essays. That's cool. As long as you know that ahead of time, don't use AI, don't get in trouble for that. But you just want to be clear about what the expectations are and what the things are that you shouldn't be using it for, so you don't get yourself in trouble.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there are things outside of what you were just saying, kara, in terms of how students can really up-level their studying is that you can use AI tools to figure out your strengths and weaknesses in terms of learning. You could, you know, do a learning inventory and put that information into AI and AI will tell you like this is a better way for you to study, based on these results. But it can also help you with figuring out individualized tutoring, so the AI could be a tutor, right, it can help answer questions and explain concepts. Now I think that there are other platforms that are better for always ensuring that you have the right information. But figuring out the kind of learner you are and what types of materials that you need to use to learn are also like great options for AI. But, like with the asterisks of always wanting to make sure that it's right and has the right, that's giving you the right information. It is great for synthesizing big amounts of information.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And then I think one of the ways that students can use it really well and you and I have used it ourselves in our personal lives and our professional lives is with some of that writing assistance and so understanding. One of the biggest AI tools out there is Grammarly, and people use it all the time. It is a really great resource. You can have it in the free version or a paid version and it can just help you. It can constantly be on your computer to help you with your grammar and spelling, and maybe you should use a little bit less passive voice in a sentence or different things. But if you use Grammarly, it will show up in some of those detectors online, like Turnitin and other coursework softwares, where it says did someone use AI with this? And it will show up as it did because Grammarly and other writing assistants are using AI, and so you just want to be aware of that.
Speaker 2:Now I would say most college instructors should know that and should know that things aren't perfect. And also maybe it's like someone's accommodation, like why would we not want someone to turn in something that was polished a little bit better than it was originally, and so it can really help with some of those different things and I think we're going to see expectations and courses and from professors and so forth change over time. But it has certainly helped me with my writing. You know, I can say here's what I want to say and I can give it bullet points and I'm like make it sound really professional, or help me with this cover letter, or help. I mean, it can do a lot of really cool things. I think you and I recently asked to take a message and make it sound less perfect, like make it sound a smidge more casual so that it's not so cold. There's lots of ways that you can use AI to help with your writing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sometimes I just want to be like I'm really. I have a lot of emotion behind this thing and I need it to take the emotion out, or I'm not coming across maybe as smart as I know I am. Because of that and that, right, I wanted to make it make, make it sound better, different, right. I will say, though and I read this study recently and I, if I can come up with a reference, I will have Kara posted in the in the resources but there are some studies now that say AI is not making is making us more dumb as a society, and this is why they did this, this tracking, this like EEG tracking, with people who are actually writing original thoughts and then people who are using AI to like modify their thoughts, and there's some research now that says that, like, overuse of AI is rewiring our brains to not think, like not have as good of original thoughts as we had been having. So, like that's a huge right, ethical thing that you have to be like gosh, it's just making me.
Speaker 1:I want to be efficient, but I also want to be smart, so I'm like where is the what's going on in my brain, or not going on in my brain, and should I actually be using more brain power to just do this thing myself than to use AI? I don't know. But you know, that's a line that I think we have to be careful with, because we don't want future generations to not be as smart. It's always like this idea that, like the next generation wants, we want better for the next generation, right, and so I want them to be as smart, as successful, et cetera, and I'm like, oh, what's going on with their brains that they don't have to do all of this thinking maybe they will be smarter because they'll get to, like, generate bigger, like bodies of information, but also like, if it is a thing where there's doing a lot of writing and a lot of thought development in ai, then what does that result in?
Speaker 2:well and it makes me think about, like I mean, I've asked it really simple questions and you get a ton of information really quickly, but it's not very specific where, when you put a really thoughtful prompt in and you did a lot of thinking about what your request is, then you get back much better information as well, and so you know it'll be interesting to see what the studies are a couple of years from now, after people have learned better how to use it and how to use it to augment their own expertise and knowledge, not to replace it in any way.
Speaker 2:Okay, so we've talked about study techniques, we've talked about writing. I think it's worth talking about how it can help us in healthcare as providers and how we can use it in, you know, clinical work to really make us better providers, and it's been. I think AI has been a part of our EHRs for a very long time, in that if it's taking all of the information that you're doing and it's helping you know what billing codes to use or is giving you those clinical prompts of like did you really want to order this medication for this condition? Because they're also on this other medication that's AI, and it's been working in the background of our EHRs and our clinical decision-making tools for a long time, and now there's just newer ways that it can also augment and help us as providers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love this way of synthesizing information for providers, right, because we're so busy, we're trying to do so many things when we're in the clinic. We're getting these new tools, too, where the AI will listen to us, take an HNP and then it will generate the HNP into our, into our Epic or our EMR, which I think is a fascinating use of, like how to save time in terms of healthcare. Again, that's not my brain being different, right, that's just being an efficient use of technology to help make me more time efficient, right, right right.
Speaker 1:So you know, some of those are excellent, I think, uses in a clinical environment, but also like in learning, clinical learning. I also think that there are some really valuable things. Like you know, we've been that. There are some really valuable things. Like you know, we've been doing simulation for a long time in healthcare education, but the way that now AI can generate scenarios and generate images make that like a whole new, I think more expanded realm of possibility for like simulated learning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and you know I've used it multiple times to come up with some prompts for simulation as well as just, you know, case scenarios for writing multiple choice questions or different things like that. It can be a really nice use, but you can see where students could use that to develop their clinical skills even more. Or you know you could use it in presentations. If you're like here's, I really want this case that includes these different things, because you know the points that you really want to hit on and you say can you create a clinical scenario for this? And it does a really nice job of doing that. And then you use your clinical expertise to tweak it, make it just exactly what you want it to be. But you know, sometimes some of the hardest things to do are getting the first words down on a PowerPoint slide or getting the first words on paper and it can just start that prompt out for you.
Speaker 1:So that is an interesting comment that you just made, because I was like gosh, sometimes I just need to like get started. And so back in the day, the textbook publishers, right, used to give us a slide deck and that slide deck was basically all the words from the chapter in slides, which is not necessarily super helpful, but it's a place to start where you can go back in and like erase 90% of it, but you actually then like have it divided out based on the reading. That was super helpful. That's the kinds of things that you're talking about. I think, like having a place to start.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I also think it can be really good in you know, making sure that. I asked that the other day I was doing something on pelvic pain and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing some differential diagnoses like what you know. And so you can, in AI, put in a list of symptoms or put in like give me the differential diagnosis for this clinical symptom and then give me the workup and initial management plan, and it can do that really well and it pulls from really good evidence out there. And you can also, depending on how much you're using AI, you can tell it to only use resources from the last three years. You could tell it to only use things from academic journals.
Speaker 2:You can be really specific in how you set up your chatbot and it will help you in being really specific and accurate with your information. You know we've already talked about my professed love for TikTok. I've certainly seen people say I've been to see like six providers and nobody's figured out what I had. But I put my information in a chat GPT and it was the accurate diagnosis. So I think it's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next several years as it gets smarter.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely yeah. So I mean, if you're a practicing midwife or you're new in practice, I think that there are certainly AI tools that are going to benefit your practice, right? Clinical decision-making kinds of tools, the ability for us to see and explore resources that we might not have previously thought of. The idea of the Cochran reviews right, we used to go to the Cochran reviews for everything and the Cochran reviews were, like you know, 20 people across the world that that had expertise in one area and they would all come together and say this is the body of evidence on this one area and here's what we think about. You know how this applies to your clinical practice. Like, the idea of the Cochran review is like a like a mind explosion right of what can happen if you use AI. Right, and you can take AI and say here's all the research on this one topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's the best guidance, right, yeah, so I think the idea of 20 experts from around the world coming together and actually synthesizing all of the literature is probably a thing of the past. However, as we've talked about, you still need those people to verify that what's coming out of these things is actually what's most accurate and correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I asked it the other day. I was doing a lecture for some family nurse practitioners and it was on prenatal care and I was going over all the labs and like what different gestational ages are they done and so forth, and when's the appropriate time, and so I asked it to make me a checklist of labs, immunizations it was labs and immunizations and imaging to ultrasound based on gestational age. It pulled it together in seconds and it was something that would have taken me, you know, a couple of hours maybe to format on my computer, but it made it really quick and easy. So those are other ways. You know you need a patient handout on such and such information. You could ask it to make you a very specific one and then tweak it with exactly what your practice preferences are, or put you know in your community. These are the resources I want you to reach out to, but it's a way that you can again work smarter, not harder, and then use your clinical expertise to really make it even that much stronger, that much better.
Speaker 2:I also use, I think, for practicing people, working people.
Speaker 2:I've used AI to help me with some of my time management.
Speaker 2:I'm always telling students that they need to be really specific with their study time, about what they're going to accomplish. If you just put down a three-hour block and say study, I'm going to spend an hour and a half of that like cleaning up my desk and then I'm going to find something else that I need to do and I'm going to probably go check Facebook because I got bored or something I gave it recently. I have this much time in the morning before everyone else that I work with which is two hours later across the country from me. I have these two hours. Tell me how I can most efficiently manage my email inbox and my calendar in those two hours, and I also want to fit in that workout, and it gave me a template. I've dropped it into my daily calendar so I know exactly if you know, and then the more you do it, the more you make it your practice, and so there's ways it can just make us so much more efficient and put reminders in place for us.
Speaker 1:I love that. You know me, I'm micro-scheduling Like it's a whole thing right of figuring out how to be time efficient, figuring out how to be time efficient. So I'm all for tools that will help us be more efficient and manage our time more, just to use our time better.
Speaker 2:There's a couple of other tools that I want people to be aware of or ways that you can use AI in clinical practice, and I will make sure that they're available on our show notes for you.
Speaker 2:But one is like some of the best prompts to use for problem solving and that can be around SWOT analysis or quality improvement, things like a fishbone diagram, mind mapping, some of those different things. So I'll make sure that that information about prompts for problem solving are available for all of you. And then there's a chat GPT mastery cheat sheet and how to go from beginner to pro, and it literally gives you some specific prompts of if you're wanting to do research versus if you're wanting to use AI for designing things, if you want it to tell you you know prompts for you know role, task and format, or before, after and bridge. There's different formats that you can ask it in prompting, and so I'll make sure that that handout is available as well, because I think those are some of the ways that we can just help ourselves in life and get up to speed with how we can use this effectively.
Speaker 1:So I have a secret to tell you about one of these things that you just mentioned, and it has to do with recent research. So you know, I've been doing research on cytotec and I had a huge data set of information. I had 9,000 charts and a ton big numbers right, and so I was working on my statistics and I love I don't love SPSS Just something that I don't use all the time. It's statistical software that, like I'm a DNP, so it's not something I'm super comfortable with. But I had great stats Professor Vanderbilt Shout out to Jeff Him and I are still friends after all of these years and he taught me the really efficient use of Excel for statistics. And I was like you know, I'm going to do all of these calculations by hand because I can. Because nerdy thing about Missy Stack is that I was once a math major and I thought I was going to be a math teacher in another life. But I love to do math and so I'm like I'm going to do all these statistics by hand.
Speaker 1:Then, after I'd done all my statistics by hand, I went into chat and I said can you give me an Excel spreadsheet that calculates risk ratio with a 95% confidence interval? And chat gave me it's like download this file. So I downloaded the file, I put my numbers in. It calculated all of my numbers for me, so I compared them to my handwritten ones, which, by the way, I want to be clear my handwritten calculations were correct. So I used the chat tool then to look at them a second time to make sure they were correct. And then I took the raw numbers and put them in chat again by themselves and I just said can you calculate the risk ratio with 95% confidence interval based on these numbers? And chat did the calculation for me and they all three were congruent.
Speaker 1:So when I wrote the article and I put them in, I felt really good about my numbers being accurate, because you know you never want to like send a research article in and have your statistics not be right.
Speaker 1:And so there was some brain power on my part because I wanted to do the math. But also even just if I would have just asked for that Excel like give me the Excel formulas so I can plug in my numbers was absolutely so helpful in just like making sure your chi squares are right or making sure your confidence intervals are right or that your risk ratios are correct. I mean, honestly, chat can probably do any of these AI tools can probably do really complex statistics for you. But I also think, while we're not necessarily in the infancy of AI, I do think it's important that you know what your numbers are supposed to look like, so that when you put them in, you know if it seems reasonable or incorrect. Right, because it's one of the things that the journals are going to be looking at when you submit your research as to whether or not your statistics are right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So. I think you've, you know, wrapped it up here with a really good point that I just want to hit on some of those important considerations and this is for everyone that uses AI, and we've mentioned all of these at different points. But I think just having this, you know, kind of to wrap up our episode, something to think about is, again, that ethical use and academic integrity making sure that you are using things the appropriate way, that you know when and when it's not appropriate to use it and that you're not plagiarizing others', work. So, if it was not your original idea, be sure you cite things and make sure you know what your institutional position is on the use of AI. And then we've talked about critically evaluating the output that you get. So, again, using that knowledge, using Missy's handwritten calculations to make sure that it matched up with what she was getting as her output and using that critical thinking is really important and you want it to be a support tool to you, but not replacing what you yourself know how to do. And then I think one of the ones, beyond just knowing what its limitations are, I think one of the best things that we can do, as anyone that uses AI is be transparent in talking about it. So, as an instructor, I've had it summarize my lecture and create a handout and then I put that at the bottom of the page so that it was created by Gemini and the date that it was created or that I, you know, use something.
Speaker 2:I think the more that we are transparent with how we're using it, other people are going to feel comfortable doing so, and then we know what.
Speaker 2:Can we trust the material that we're seeing? Can we trust that someone created this or that they use some assistance on it? So I think it's just going to get better and better over time. I think it's just going to get better and better over time, just like people that have used templates in their EHR for years, we've all had templates right for our notes and I jokingly say every time I leave my dermatologist, I'm like she did not tell me to use SPSF or SPF and to wear a wide brimmed hat. I know she would normally tell me that, but it's in every single note that it says that she did Just think about. If you're using AI in your EHR, if you're doing those things, make sure that you're reading the notes for accuracy and make sure that you're double checking things, and just like we should in any of the different things that we've been using over the years to help us and how we care for people.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Any of the different things that we've been using over the years to help us and how we care for people. I think this conversation has made me so happy because I think we have given some people some things to think about about their use of AI, but then also some tools that are just really helpful and also some insight into things that you probably didn't know that are running in your life that are based on AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, exactly Right.
Speaker 1:So amazing. We will get some things also posted on the website. So remember to find the show notes, you go to deliberateexamprepcom and you click on the podcast link. That will take you to all the show notes, with all of our downloads and our email addresses, et cetera, if you need us or want to talk to us. So thanks for joining us for the Engaged Midwife Podcast. We can't wait to talk to you again. Take care.