When Dr. Surena Namdari prepares for surgery, he makes sures to prep the patient, his support team and the robot that will assist him in the operating room.
Dr. Namdari is a shoulder and elbow surgeon with Rothman Orthopaedics and a professor of orthopedic surgery at Thomas Jefferson University. He said the integration of AI, robotics and augmented reality are making the most complex surgeries easier and more accurate.
In procedures like shoulder replacement, Namdari said, it is important that surgeons identify the best positioning and size for implants.
Patients undergo a CAT scan to show bone placement, and then that scan is entered into a planning software that creates a 3D model of the shoulder. In the virtual world, Namdari said, surgeons can do the operation on the computer to determine the best position for the implant.
“We play with different sizes, different positions of the implant, and then we can model what the ideal location is of that implant,” he said. “Traditionally, we’ve just taken that plan and tried to eyeball it and reproduce it during surgery. But with augmented reality, we can wear a headset during surgery that has the plan loaded into it and then, on the patient, we put these tracker devices that link with the headset and with the preoperative plan that we’ve made.”
He said these tools make surgeons better at assessing where implants should go. They allow doctors to operate “precisely within less than a millimeter of accuracy” to the pre-op plan and easily reproduce and research common procedures.
These advances “open our eyes” to the fact that traditional methods were not as accurate as previously thought, Namdari said.
The AI boom has led to advancements in many industries. In health care, physicians and hospital systems have been using artificial intelligence to augment tasks, like administrative filings, note-taking and even specialty surgeries.
According to a recent survey from the American Medical Association, nearly two-thirds, 66 percent, of physicians were using AI in 2024, up from 38 percent the year before. Most reported using AI for documentation of things like billing codes, charts and patient notes. Physicians were reportedly more enthusiastic about AI usage but still expressed a need for increased oversight to increase their trust in the new technology.
The goal is to provide simpler and more accurate procedures for complex conditions, alleviate doctor burnout and lower administrative costs. But with the integration of AI comes hesitation and fears of job loss, privacy breaches and misinformation.
In a world of growing automation and augmentation, what is the role of doctors in an AI world?
Newsweek recently published its ranking of America’s Leading Doctors 2025, which highlights more than 2,800 physicians from 15 medical specialties around the country. Rothman Orthopaedics is a leading orthopedic hospital in the country, with over 30 locations in Florida and the greater Philadelphia region.
AI has also helped Namdari, who was ranked No. 16 among shoulder surgeons, before he goes into the OR. He said AI can use patient data to determine which people are predisposed to a certain complication after surgery, like infection or fracture, which can help doctors prevent those possible outcomes.
“We do an incredibly high volume of surgery at our institution, so we have a lot of available data, and that allows us to put that data into AI to help develop predictive models, so we’re able to predict which patients are at increased risk for some of these problems,” he said. “And that helps us from a diagnostic standpoint.”
On the administrative side, hand and upper extremities surgeon Dr. Christopher Jones said his biggest issue is documentation. Dr. Jones is part of Rothman and was ranked No. 2 on Newsweek‘s hand surgeon specialty list.
As someone who sees up to 45 patients in a day, Jones said, the documentation part of the job “can be painful.”
“I don’t have time to dictate notes during the day, so at night, I go home and dictate,” he said. “There are AI programs that can take the place of a scribe, that can listen remotely at your interaction with the patient and transcribe everything they hear and generate a note from it.”
Jones said this has enabled better communication between him and his patients. During in-person consultations, he can make direct eye contact with people while the AI bot takes notes on the conversations. AI can also help find a common language with patients by taking complex medical vocabulary and translating it into layman’s terms.
“Being able to write in a more common language is really effective for building trust and a good doctor-patient relationship, because I can tell lots of times when I’m speaking in words that people don’t understand, they’re sort of glazed over and looking off in the distance,” he said. “So having a very simplistic way of talking about things is helpful. I use analogies lots of times, and having ChatGPT simplify my language for written materials is really helpful.”
It’s not only the patients who are benefiting from AI integration. Dr. Alexander Vaccaro is one of the top spine surgeons on Newsweek‘s ranking and the president of Rothman Orthopaedics. He said performing spinal surgeries is often tough on the mind and body. With new technology, he can perform these surgeries quickly, with more accuracy and less chance of complications.
“I’ve done experiments where I’ve put monitors on my respiratory rate, my perspiration, my heart rate, and I’ve looked at before and after,” he said, observing that using these enabling technologies “really decreases the stress.”
Vaccaro is a major proponent of using AI. As an administrator, he wants to “figure out how to make it less expensive,” so it can start cutting waste and redundancy within the hospital.
“I’m always trying to improve the outcomes of enabling technologies and minimizing costs on both sides,” he said. “The leader is the one who says, ‘I can improve the outcomes, and I’m going to make it affordable so that everyone can use it.’”
Vaccaro added that those who are afraid of AI aren’t using it, and “once you start using it, you’re not afraid anymore.” But he does acknowledge that AI is “flawed.”
The AI is only as good as the data that goes into it. Many AI datasets are biased, Vaccaro explained, because the data extrapolated from medical records and trials are not comprehensive.
“Automatically, the data is flawed,” he said. “It doesn’t have [a lot of] information on marginalized communities, so you have to keep that in mind when you make determinations of health care and to understand the social determinants of health. That’s the downside of AI.”
The explosion of AI means the technology is finding its way into the hands of everyone. Instead of doomscrolling on WebMD after feeling the slightest ache, patients can now ask AI bots like ChatGPT to explain their symptoms, diagnose a perceived issue and outline a treatment plan.
Dr. Ashis Barad is the chief digital and technology officer at Hospital for Special Surgery. He said the personalized care AI allows can empower patients to be more involved in the decision-making process for treatment. This will lead to a massive transformation in the democratization of knowledge and expertise, he said.
“I actually am excited about people having more context about their own lives,” he said. “They’re going to own their own data in the future. Context is going to also be transformed from a consumer level. You could imagine your own personal ChatGPT that knows all about you, and it can inform what you should do next.”
But if an AI bot can deliver a diagnosis and treatment plan, what is the role of doctors?
Many of Dr. Vaccaro’s patients come into consultations after asking ChatGPT for advice. He said it only adds more depth to the conversation.
“People do all that homework, and when they come in, a lot of times they have a definitive idea on how they want to be treated when they finally see me; that’s not unusual, and that doesn’t bother me at all,” he said.
Dr. Vaccaro said using ChatGPT might decrease visits to the emergency room or urgent care clinics because people can act on the information they receive online.
In the city of Philadelphia, he’s seen the total number of office visits and elective surgical procedures go down, as patients are getting their basic diagnostic information from bots. When they do go to the doctor, Vaccaro said, patients know what they want, but they might not have the full picture.
“[I’m] sort of chuckling in my head, saying, well, you’re about 60 percent correct, but this is why you probably should rethink the other 40 percent,” he said. “The patients are more educated, but I think because they’re so educated, they tend to not want to take the risks as often for some elective procedures, because they are fully knowledgeable about the potential complications typically. I think [they are] more sophisticated customers.”
As health systems continue to make advancements and adopt the latest in AI and robotics, the best physicians know that their primary goals won’t change.
“Job one is always to provide and deliver superior patient care—everything else we do is secondary,” Dr. Namdari said. “Job one is to develop a great relationship with your patient, identify their goals and do what we do, surgically, and be technically excellent in order to achieve the best results.”
Utilizing technology is a key part of that. And Namdari said that innovating and trying to develop the field are what make the top-tier surgeons stand apart.
“I think the way we measure success today is not different than how we did 50 years ago,” Namdari said. “It’s going to be related to the outcomes for the patient and whether they are satisfied and complication-free. I don’t think those goals will really ever change in medicine. I think the way we get to those goals will change, and the way that we evaluate whether we’ve reached those goals will change.”
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