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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are Driving A Big Shift
As societies and governments wrestle with the rise of artificial intelligence, The Short coats sit down with Dr. Lindsey Knake, a CCOM alum neonatologist and associate chief health information officer, to map out where AI actually stands in medicine right now. M2s Mukund Viswanadha, Deeraj Manika, and Samee Jung sort through the muddle of chatbots, agents, and machine learning, then get specific about the tools already embedded in their days: Nabla’s ambient listening scribes documenting patient conversations in real time, Open Evidence cutting through 500 PubMed results to the five that matter, and Epic’s Evidently pulling buried data out of years of outside-hospital notes in minutes instead of hours.
Dr. Knake also lays out Iowa’s new clinical informatics fellowship in detail — a two-year, post-residency program, still brand new to Iowa though established elsewhere for a decade, where fellows split 80% protected time and 20% clinical work. Then there’s Epic’s physician-builder boot camp, a week of training that turns clinicians into people who can actually build inside the EHR, plus a seat at the chief health information officer meetings where decisions like adopting new tools are made. She traces her own path into the field: a biomedical engineering degree, a mentor’s offhand question during her Vanderbilt fellowship interview, and a master’s in biomedical informatics picked up alongside her neonatology training. The informatics fellowship Dr. Knake co-leads up is explicitly framed as the pipeline for the next generation of doctors who’ll need to vet AI tools, not just use them.
As with many conversations around AI, the conversation doesn’t stay comfortable. Dr. Knake pushes back on her own optimism, raising the specter of de-skilling — what happens to clinical reasoning when the differential is a prompt away — and the students wonder if some are using AI as a crutch rather than a tool. And then there is the opposite reaction: students who refuse to engage with these tools. They’re not alone–some institutions are still locking AI out of medical training even as their own students use it anyway. It’s a frank look at a field trying to figure out what to keep, what to automate, and what gets lost and found in those decisions.
Episode credits:
- Producer: Isa Perez-Sandi, Dave Etler
- Co-hosts: Deeraj Monika, Samee Jung, Mukund Viswanadha
- Guest: Lindsey Knake, MD
- Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson
The views and opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to the individuals who share them. They do not represent the positions of the University of Iowa, the Carver College of Medicine, or the State of Iowa. All discussions are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Nothing said on this podcast should be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition. Always seek qualified professional guidance for personal decisions.
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