Watch This — How AI Will Disrupt Plastic Surgery – with Clark Mackey

Summary

Highlights

• AI is not just a fad; it's fundamentally changing how plastic surgeons manage their practice. 🤖
• Clark Mackey highlights the dual benefits of AI: saving money and staying competitive. 💰
• AI can be a powerful ally in increasing efficiency and offering better patient outcomes. 🌟
• The conversation touches on the ethical and economic implications of widespread AI adoption. 🤔
• Fun fact: AI can make even the dreariest of Saturday work sessions far more productive! 🎉

Key Takeaways

• AI is here to stay, and plastic surgeons who don't adapt might get left behind. 🏃‍♂️
• AI offers a chance to boost clinic efficiency and improve patient results. 🎯
• There is untapped potential in using AI for content creation and operational tasks. 📈
• While AI can replace some human tasks, the human touch in patient care remains indispensable. ❤️
• AI could benefit both tech companies and patients, but staying updated is crucial. 🔄

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Guest Introduction The chapter titled 'Introduction and Guest Introduction' explores the importance of adopting AI in the field of plastic surgery, focusing on efficiency improvements. Katherine Mey, the host, introduces the concept of the podcast 'Beauty and the Biz' which delves into the business and marketing aspects of the plastic surgery industry. Katherine, an author and consultant to plastic surgeons, usually interviews plastic surgeons about their practices, although this episode features a different format.
• 01:01 - 05:00: Discussion on AI in Plastic Surgery The chapter introduces Clark Mackey, the director of online marketing and owner of Cake Websites and More. Clark has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and SEO and is a certified Google partner, establishing his authority in online marketing. The focus of the discussion is on artificial intelligence in the context of digital marketing and its relevance in plastic surgery, highlighting it as a hot topic in the industry.
• 05:01 - 10:00: AI Benefits for Plastic Surgeons The chapter discusses the increasing role of AI in the field of plastic surgery and emphasizes the importance for plastic surgeons to stay updated on AI advancements to avoid falling behind.
• 10:01 - 15:30: Who Benefits from AI in the Next 5-10 Years? The chapter discusses the broad and often generic use of the term AI, which encompasses a variety of specific technologies. It mentions that AI is a frequent discussion topic at conferences and in education resources like YouTube videos. The transcript highlights the mixed reception AI has among professionals, particularly mentioning doctors, with some showing strong interest and acceptance of AI technologies.
• 15:31 - 23:00: Simple Ways to Start Using AI The chapter titled 'Simple Ways to Start Using AI' discusses why plastic surgeons should care about artificial intelligence. The primary reason is the opportunity to save money and increase profitability. AI provides competitive advantages by enabling faster and more cost-effective processes, thus addressing efficiency concerns.
• 23:01 - 31:30: Tools for Online Visibility and AI's Role The chapter discusses the importance of adopting AI for maintaining efficiency in online visibility. It highlights a case where an agency noticed a competitor rapidly increasing their content publication through early AI implementation. This strategic use of AI helped the competitor enhance their online presence rather than negatively impacting another project.
• 31:31 - 40:00: AI for Managing Photos, Reviews, and Consents The chapter discusses the benefits and potential of adopting AI tools for managing photos, reviews, and consents, using the example of optimizing web traffic and rank through early adoption. It advises that although temporary gains can be made by cranking out content, sustainable ranking requires careful strategy. Emphasis is placed on experimentation to achieve efficiency and stay competitive, as the market and competitors evolve.
• 40:01 - 45:30: AI and Marketing Personalization AI is revolutionizing the medical field by enhancing surgical precision through advanced imaging tools that superimpose ideal surgical paths onto the surgeon's view. This innovation allows doctors to pause and review similar complications in real-time, without leaving the operating room, streamlining procedures and potentially improving outcomes.
• 45:31 - 55:00: Challenges and Downsides of AI The chapter discusses the challenges and downsides of AI, focusing on its role as a replacement for labor. The speaker encourages clients to consider AI as a tool for efficiency and competitive advantage, emphasizing profitability and agency retooling.
• 55:01 - 60:00: Conclusion and How to Learn More about AI The conclusion chapter emphasizes the importance of not being influenced by external agendas when adopting AI, whether from investors or competitors. The speaker, who has used AI extensively in both marketing and business consulting through their agency, finds it invaluable for daily tasks. They express the heightened ease and expanded capabilities AI tools provide, such as performing complex calculations effortlessly compared to previous methods.

Watch This — How AI Will Disrupt Plastic Surgery – with Clark Mackey Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 if someone doesn't adopt AI you're not noticing the ways that you are uh less [Music] efficient hello and welcome to Beauty and the Biz where we talk about the business and marketing side of plastic surgery i'm your host Katherine Mey author of Your Aesthetic Practice: What Your Patients Are Saying as well as consultant to plastic surgeons to get them more patients and more profits now we typically um would have his usual interview with a plastic surgeon talking about his practice but today we have
• 00:30 - 01:00 something different and it's incredibly timely i'm excited to introduce Clark Mackey he's the director of online marketing and owner of Cake Websites and More with over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and SEO now Clark is also a certified Google partner making him an authority on all things online marketing now I invited Clark today to discuss one of the hottest topics in the industry right now and that is artificial intelligence otherwise known
• 01:00 - 01:30 as AI so with AI rapidly changing the way we operate it's critical for plastic surgeons to stay ahead of the curve so they don't get left behind so I wanted to talk with Clark about AI because he knows an awful lot about it and I'm learning a lot about it and quite frankly I'm using it every day in my own business so Clark welcome to Beauty and the Biz thank you it's a pleasure to be here oh that's fantastic so just just let's start out what is AI in plain English
• 01:30 - 02:00 um it's it's just training a computer to perform like a human uh and AI is a catchall term so if someone is uh you know studying up and watching YouTube videos and going to conferences and hearing speakers AI is going to be thrown around as a uh almost generic term to incorporate a whole bunch of specific technologies yeah that's true and I and at the conferences we AI is a hot topic right now and um there some of the doctors are really embracing it some
• 02:00 - 02:30 could care less um but those who do care I think they need to and answer that question would you please why should plastic surgeons care about AI well the first is I mean the first reason is positive it's because AI is going to basically offer the opportunity to save money and be more profitable uh and whether that's by creating some competitive advantages by doing things faster or cheaper uh it's going to combine basically some efficiency questions so if someone
• 02:30 - 03:00 doesn't adopt AI you're not noticing the ways that you are uh less efficient and I actually have a funny story running an agency that in 2021 we were tracking a site that was competing with a project that we were working on and we noticed that their rate of publication shot way up and it was an early use of an AI model to dump a bunch of pages online and instead of tanking that other product it actually started to draw more
• 03:00 - 03:30 traffic and rank for a bunch more terms now I'm not endorsing you know nobody should run out and just crank out web pages or blog posts or social media posts because of that those things didn't rank for long term but it's an example of the kind of early uh potential of adopting these tools and if you don't experiment with them you won't get the efficiency and then the other reason is kind of the stick in the equation of the carrot and stick and that is that other people are going to
• 03:30 - 04:00 use these tools and gain those advantages which would reduce your practice they would e even even the surgical results are ultimately going to be affected by AI as imaging tools get rolled out that allow a doctor to see an overlay in front of his glass of the ideal uh location for a certain thing while he's operating or pause for a second in the middle of surgery and have an example of a similar complication flash up in front of his eyes without him having to leave you know the
• 04:00 - 04:30 scrubbed in state so these tools are being pushed on us and they really are a replacement for labor that's what I encourage all of our clients to think about as they're adopting this stuff it's what we think about as an agency one of the reasons I was excited to come on here is because we have been involved in this multi-year process to retool as an agency and make sure we're as efficient as possible and that we're delivering all the competitive advantages but yeah first reason is to be more profitable and second reason is
• 04:30 - 05:00 to make sure you don't get reduced by somebody else's agenda whether it's the investors in the AI tool pushing it on us or another competitor just adopting it ahead of you i I couldn't agree more as a marketing agency as well as a business consulting agency I have used it so much it has become my everyday resource um I can put numbers in there and have it calculate them in different ways that I couldn't have done before easily um I can do so much more now i've always done
• 05:00 - 05:30 a ton of content i am so much more efficient i've spent like every Saturday morning for years you know writing content on the weekends i can do it now in an hour when it used to take me four um just watching how it has changed the way I work i still get everything done i think it's more creative because it comes up with more ideas than I had come up with on my own and it just makes all of us more efficient so I can get a lot more done and it's better quality i'm
• 05:30 - 06:00 I'm loving AI so far i I I hope it you know doesn't end the world because I really enjoy it yeah i hope it doesn't end the world uh either yeah so who's who's going to benefit most from AI in the next 5 to 10 years is it going to be the surgeons the patients or the big tech platforms [Music] um over the five-year period I think it's the big tech platforms and when I say big tech platform I'm not talking about the actual AI companies that you
• 06:00 - 06:30 hear about in the news some of those companies may go boom and bust you know they were all losing money handover fist as as we're recording this podcast because it takes so much investment to improve the technology and so any of the companies that are rolling out the AI models themselves are risking a lot they're doing that because they think they're building a a future toll road um if lots and lots of people build virtual receptionists and chat bots and uh
• 06:30 - 07:00 social media content creators and uh X-ray uh interpreters and all those things then the toll road makes a lot on each little transaction those bets can fail and AI can still succeed so the big uh software companies are that I think win in the next five years are tool companies and that's sometimes referred to as software as a service or SAS mhm um at any of the plastic surgery
• 07:00 - 07:30 meetings any of the cosmetic meetings there's tool vendors everywhere in the in the exhibit hall they're all trying to sell us on something that is a monthly subscription or has a a service element that we have to replace some part for um that model I think is going to do really well over the fiveyear time frame i think over a long time frame though it doesn't do quite so well and that's where I think the 10-year winner I'm going to go with patience um
• 07:30 - 08:00 I think the benefits of even better copywriting like you were just us saying a a better blog post it it helps the patients uh certainly a better surgical result helps the patients and as physicians are able to share information and the kind of sharing that goes on in the very best hands-on seminars at the different meetings where one surgeon is presenting on complications and saying this is how I did it 10 years ago this is how I do it now this is why I changed that type of information being at your
• 08:00 - 08:30 fingertips in your day-to-day at the practice that helps the patient so I think at the 10ear horizon is the patient who's benefiting for sure i just got back from the big aesthetic meeting in Austin and they were um showing a lot of interactive tools that you were just describing so for example there's a cute little widget you could put on your website and the patient um uh uploads their photo and the AI little widget tells you how much filler you need and
• 08:30 - 09:00 frankly I needed a lot of filler but but the point was um it was really fun it's a sticky way to keep somebody on your website and patients love that interactive kind of connectivity to your website you stay longer google sees that they're staying longer so you'll get ranked better another one is adding a chatbot but um I've just watched too many of these chat bots that don't help um somebody will say um oh you know uh what can I help you with and and it'll say oh how much is a rhinoplasty and then the answer is well once you come in for a consultation we'll be able to
• 09:00 - 09:30 examine you and then give you a quote then and then it says do you have any other questions um yes what would be the recovery and the the answer is literally the answer is well that depends on a lot of different variables and after your consultation you'll be uh we'll address all of that and I just thought really think about what you're doing when you're setting these things up think like a patient they are looking for an answer give them an answer you know don't mess around and try to get and don't ask for their name and number yet first give to get give them some
• 09:30 - 10:00 information so then they're willing to give you some information um I just think there's so much room there for improvement and such possibilities because nowadays leads are tough lead generation is tough it's expensive and if you can triage some of these leads that you're getting to really like um pull out the ones who are super interested and the only way you can tell that is by behavior so AI is just so darn good at figuring out oh we've got a live one here they're answering my
• 10:00 - 10:30 questions you know they're clicking on the buttons so so interesting um let me ask you this give me one although I just named a couple but give me one super simple way a practice can start using AI this week i think um an easy one is to record all of your internal meetings and transcribe them uh there are some HIPPA compliant tr uh meeting agents that you basically invite you sign up you put in your credit card make you know make sure it's a HIPACO compliant product when
• 10:30 - 11:00 you're signing up for it um and then it just sits in your meeting like another employee but it records the whole meeting video and audio and transcribes it and then that transcription that content you need to have your practice admin or whoever is running the office create a dedicated folder locally in your in your hard drive system or in your computer where you store those things for long term uh it's a very easy step it makes it much much easier to then use your own recorded notes to
• 11:00 - 11:30 build a better business and one of the fundamental uh ways we can protect ourselves from the downsides of AI is to make sure we are building our own um data warehouse basically i mean uh ju just imagine a filing cabinet and you have some of your old tax records you're required to keep what you really want in that filing cabinet is the outline of the best book you've ever read or the snippet of poetry that you wrote that still matters
• 11:30 - 12:00 to you or your favorite cases and surgical results the more you get in that filing cabinet a future version of this technology is going to be able to search directly on that data it's not going to need a software service layer it's not going to need even necessarily a chat interface but it is going to need the database so you turn on meeting recordings this week and you start building that database and then you're going to figure out later exactly how you build on it and what you ask it but
• 12:00 - 12:30 wondering what your process was 10 years in the future on a certain date in the past could be an effortless query if you turn it on so yeah record some meetings hello there quick pause to ask you if you have gaps in your practice draining your time profits and peace of mind if so I can help you streamline grow and take the guesswork out of your practice book your practice growth strategy review at katherineley.com and let's turn those gaps into growth now back to the podcast
• 12:30 - 13:00 so out of curiosity um a lot of us use Zoom and Zoom now automatically has an AI assistant on there and it's doing the full-on transcript every word and it's not perfect but it's really good because we didn't have it before and I love it also does a summary so I do an awful lot of Zoom all day and I can easily go back and reference when I miss something um it has been so helpful but are you
• 13:00 - 13:30 saying it's not HIPPA compliant i don't know about that part i you know I don't know off the top of my head if Zoom is HIPPA compliant or not but there are at least two others that are Zoom level quality that are okay i guess we should make a caveat of check check about that because HIPPA is a big deal in our world um so you definitely want to be HIPPA compliant yeah and I know you I know many of the folks that will listen to this are running medical practices or our doctors you know if you're dealing with patient info and you would be in a staff meeting in a medical practice yes it must be HIPPA compliant there are
• 13:30 - 14:00 others where you can just go find a note-taking tool you like and turn it on um I do have a second I know you asked for one thing there is a second AI thing and this is a specific uh tool that I'm going to reference at the risk of it being out of date but uh there's an AI tool vendor called Open Evidence that is for doctors and I don't know if it is actually still in beta or if it's going to some type of subscription model i think it may still be technically in an open beta kind of situation u but it's
• 14:00 - 14:30 designed for doctors to share case type information with other doctors and then make uh referencing any medical study kind almost effortless so it requires you to be a physician to participate to put in your NPI number but once you're in you know it's like a well of information to cross reference very specific medical information from really the whole body of peer-reviewed medical studies so that's one to just it's not that hard to sign up uh last time I
• 14:30 - 15:00 looked it did not charge um but that's one that I would try especially if I had my own NBI number which I don't yeah so for um for visibility online like what would be your favorite tool to recommend to a doctor looking for more visibility so there there are a couple of basic tools that I think everyone needs um the the first is and and there are plenty of uh this is just a free dashboard that you will need to
• 15:00 - 15:30 reference and bookmark but you'll you need a tool for tracking which AI model is doing what because it changes all the time so a a simple search for uh you know LLM dashboard or which LLM is best or token limits for an LLM which is how much information it can process all at once will take you to some of these leaderboards and it will indicate what the different AIs are doing well at a given moment so and you're asking
• 15:30 - 16:00 about visibility but before you do that like you don't want to take the free version of ChatGpt right now as we're recording and spend a lot of time asking it to give you content if two months ago their competitor released a paid tool that's 200% better because the the time you spend getting mediocre content out of last year's technology would be much better spent on so you'll need to know what the latest is so you want to track one of these lead reports um and the
• 16:00 - 16:30 second thing is to have a paid account with one of these tools even if you're a naysayer it's time to have a paid account so that you can keep track of your own work u you know have a have a running record and be able to experiment with your own prompts that type of thing now getting to online visibility what's the simplest thing you could do to get some online visibility take that paid account and ask it to rewrite your description on one of your profiles great idea take your medical board profile that you have not looked at in
• 16:30 - 17:00 six months or six years and feed your own bio to the AI and ask it to rewrite it it will it will give you a better description to go on that board website or on that directory site i have literally given it um my Instagram profile my any paragraph if I need a PS uh it is amazing but you're right these AI tools there are so many of them and
• 17:00 - 17:30 they're all vying for you know who's going to win and and I'm so used to personally I would say just start with the $20 a month chat GTP just to get your feet wet um my my chat GTP knows me so well that it has become my business advisor my marketing team my strategist it's amazing but you're right already today I was listening to another podcast
• 17:30 - 18:00 and it said spending $200 a month on blank is going to give you 2,000 times you know the power that you're getting right now and I think how are we all going to figure all this out because do I need 2,000 times more like right now you only know what you only know and so right now I'm thinking I am already I promise five times more efficient than I used to be and my and it has so much ideology that it brings along with it it gives me so many more creative ideas but
• 18:00 - 18:30 but I'm just stuck right now with that one because it knows me so well i would hate to try another one and but then that would be a disservice how are we going to figure that out the leaderboard uh the leaderboard and then u these these AI tools work in layers basically so by focusing on the business problem you need solved and then storing the prompt you write or the output you get from one particular tool today storing that in your own you know data warehouse be it Google docs or you know whatever
• 18:30 - 19:00 it is you're going to contemplate that lets you come back to it and prove it with whatever AI becomes but it is appropriate to think of AI in layers and for it to be modular like Legos so you have a database you have tools you have large language models and you have the core AI technologies and you're going to be able to snap different pieces in place um and we were talking a second ago about chat bots i I do think in 2025 one of the big
• 19:00 - 19:30 places that practices will see g see a change in the marketplace is that these chat bots are going to start working a lot better m um the chat bots of old uh as an agency I I really never had a great relationship with any particular chatbot if you staffed it with not your staff they didn't give the right answers if you staffed it with your staff you had to hire a way up to keep all the hours open if you closed it when you weren't there and just ran it during the office day well during the office day
• 19:30 - 20:00 you could just answer the phone um so a lot of the old chatbot models had things that made them you know broken just as a matter of kind of wasn't solving the right business problem but an AI that's really well trained on your own information and also rests on the shoulders of an LLM trained on you know all western knowledge has the potential to limit the conversation in the chat to just the needs of the patient and nudge them along just a little bit and then because it's an AI
• 20:00 - 20:30 and because everything is digital it can score that conversation as it goes transcribe it as it goes and then hand it off after a few seconds or a minute or so to someone who's a live person who's ready to really help that patient and but they'd be receiving a hot lead at that point pre-scored u I think things like that are coming down the pipe pretty fast now um and in that situation AI chat be something reasonable to evaluate i just I I um hope the big companies get
• 20:30 - 21:00 better at their chat bots because those I find still so frustrating when I want to ask a question but you can only get an answer the way they want you to ask the question like there's no um miscellaneous like let me just tell you what the problem is and then you tell me how to fix it like you can't tell them a story you have to fit into the the the little buttons that they give you and I find that so frustrating so one of the things we don't want to do in our industry is frustrate the cosmetic patient with a credit card you know it better be convenient and easy and I know
• 21:00 - 21:30 there's always a trade-off so I would love to do let's say scheduling online i don't need to talk to anybody i would love to schedule online especially for the easy things like Botox or filler i already know all about that i just want to tell you I'm available when I'm available i really like that a lot i know our industry seems to struggle with that because they say "Oh well you know we have to talk to them first and I think you really have to think that through because the patient with a credit card really does like convenience and time savings." Um so I would figure
• 21:30 - 22:00 that out you know yeah and I think there's some legitimate struggle on the back end of any office and you're limited by your EMR system you're limited by your you know internal database and network you're limited by your actual staff and I think those things are what makes scheduling look so difficult if you could if a if a physician could eliminate some of those bottlenecks then having a scheduler operating higher up in your your funnel you know your your desire path of your patient as they come to you would be a
• 22:00 - 22:30 help uh but you but it's some of those behind the front desk problems that have to be solved to make it work and sometimes the problem is just that you're you don't have any scheduling option that really works well and then if you're a very large software company and you've sold say you know EMR licenses to thousands of practices you don't quickly make changes to that software so you're not quickly going to make the scheduling thing really brilliant and the small software company that might have brilliant scheduling isn't going to have a connection to the
• 22:30 - 23:00 backend that now that you're using so it could be a minute but not i just think we all have to if you want to play this game in for the future and the future is now i think you have to stop and think this through and figure out the solution i don't think we can keep saying "Oh this is too big too big can't figure that can't I don't know i don't know what to do." I really the more you ask Chat GPT what to do it'll tell you what to do you know there's just too much knowledge out there now at our fingertips for us not to figure things
• 23:00 - 23:30 out um it that's I think that's been the biggest change in my life it is now the biggest problem-solving tool I have because whenever all day long we're all challenged all I do all day is ask it questions and it gives me an answer and it's usually a darn good answer and I didn't have to Google it and I didn't have to go to YouTube because that's what I used to do i used to go to YouTube and Google a lot and now I just go to ChatGP it's gotten so efficient because it knows everything google knows a lot youtube knows a lot but chat knows
• 23:30 - 24:00 everything it's crazy you know it's amazing it is and I I want to say something about the content that we get out of these AIS because right now it's still too weak for a lot of our applications in some niches of business it it is good enough to go to publish or to look at it and decide if it needs any edits and then approve and publish but in the medical space it often needs a good bit of touchup or rewrite or a real strict fact check for medical information
• 24:00 - 24:30 so that the nature of the way the AI is trained is to analyze a huge set of documents and then predict what the best sentences would be to answer the query it's been given or the prompt in this case so in a way AI is averaging all of human knowledge or all of medical knowledge every time you prompt it for many businesses coming to like suddenly publishing at the average level is a huge gain uh you know I've run an agency
• 24:30 - 25:00 for a pretty long time now and for many many years we had a pretty heavy copywriting advantage where our content was well structured we knew the industry we knew the topics uh our pages tended to be a little longer but they did really well at the top of the funnel because they were answering patient questions and they were structured well but as AI did that job even sometimes the structure job it does even better but as AI gives everybody sort of 50th
• 25:00 - 25:30 percentile plus a little bit level content instead of the best written content on the best plastic surgeon site standing head and shoulders above the rest of the industry in a given region everybody else is answering the same question now and there's a bit of a race to the bottom using AI so you still have to come back and add in some expertise or embed that video of you explaining the topic in addition to the things that your own team has written that have been perhaps passed through the AI to really
• 25:30 - 26:00 get the right content but remember that even though AI today is still maybe not delivering what you wish it could generate it's gotten here in you know basically two and a half years i think it was November 2022 and the first chat GPT model to the public was GPT30 level content was really what starting to be widespread so it's improving so quickly that uh you cannot count its current
• 26:00 - 26:30 failures against it long term because it's on this kind of hockey stick like progression of getting better and better and better i want to reiterate what you said unique content is the secret there the word unique and you can't be unique if everyone's using the same tool we're all going to end up with the same blog posts or the same FAQs or the same video scripts the thing that makes it unique is the audio and the video and also like um I just gave a talk on this like for
• 26:30 - 27:00 example when in in the copy you can add things like well given my 15 years of experience treating 5,000 patients or performing 5,000 tummy tucks that's how you're and then and then you add in a video and then you add some before and after photos with your watermark that's how you're going to make it unique and that's how Google will then see you much more as an authority than somebody who just you know did what everyone else did yeah I do have a slight take on that so
• 27:00 - 27:30 adding back in the unique content is very important but I also have a contrarian point to make and that is that more than uh human visitors the website and your social media content should also be built for non-human visitors ais are visiting your content and they are asking the the question of how does this fit with all the things we've already learned and one of the things AI is very good at is sorting and categorizing information this means that some content
• 27:30 - 28:00 that is not unique is actually still valuable because for example your social media posts are being compared to the structure of that topic i mean imagine a flowchart from Wikipedia of everything about the uh Keller funnel history of it all the things complication rates all the studies so if you drop a social media content about uh using Keller funnels you want it to fit that imaginary topic map and just being
• 28:00 - 28:30 unique is not the only thing you're being graded on you're being graded on how does it compare and for that reason u you know you need to define the thing you're talking about the nonhuman visitor is looking for what is the thing what is a Keller funnel you might skip over that thinking your audience doesn't need that basic answer but the AI does u so sometimes content that doesn't feel totally unique is still necessary in this new world and these AIs are hungry for information you can think of them as
• 28:30 - 29:00 kind of careening across the web and landscape sucking everything up you want it to make sure you compare as an authority with all the topic on the subject so to clarify when I do content for practices I'm always talking from the cosmetic patient point of view they don't care what a killer funnel is you know that's right but are you saying you want to cover both you want I'm saying you want to cover you want to cover both okay you don't do it all in one article or all in
• 29:00 - 29:30 one tweet you know you you cover both but yeah okay then um can AI help with tasks like managing before and after photos or getting patient reviews or tracking uh consents you know where can you use it pragmatically in the practice those tasks are a challenge uh it is going to help with those things but because we're in a really specific
• 29:30 - 30:00 medical niche uh before and after photos of course they have to be completely anonymous they have to have most of the identifying information removed they have to look like medical before and after photos and not like wedding glamour shots so right now the image AI tools are a little behind the content language writing AI tools but they're catching up fast and I do expect there'll be some before and after tools that start to work but right now there not any that pass our standards similarly patient reviews
• 30:00 - 30:30 there are software service companies selling help with review building and some of those tools do provide help but there's no magic AI tool that is going to convince your patients to leave you a review unless they're really happy with your services and unless they have an easy opportunity so that you know the trick to every review workflow is have a great service and then remove as much friction as possible from getting that testimonial to go online u right now
• 30:30 - 31:00 there's no AI fix to that equation that I know of um but there are some ways that you know you can experience these some of the benefits of AI now one of them is in content marketing you know if you're doing social media using the AI tools to generate your ideas to help you with planning they're they're very good at that uh they're very good at suggesting a broad range of topics and that can really speed up your social media team it can really help inside
• 31:00 - 31:30 your office if there is a person who's multitasking and one of their jobs is make sure the website is current that type of thing so the content tools right now can really help inside the bracket i love the content tools the image generators are not as good um I've had um you know how you can go on one of them and say um give me a surgeon talking to a female patient give me a male patient a male surgeon talking to a female patient and what's funny is it'll
• 31:30 - 32:00 come up with something but the woman is looking off to the right and the doctor has an extra arm coming out and um I've even done it with like the videos where um I give it my video and my voice and then I give it a script and it'll you know I make an avatar and then it'll make me a video but then I have like six fingers i don't think they have the hands figured out yet but the image generator is not good because right now what I have to do and what every what we all have to do is we have to go to some
• 32:00 - 32:30 kind of like Adobe and buy images you know and I was trying to you could spend hours looking for images so I can't wait till they fix that part the image generator is not working for me they're they're getting better but they don't work well right now um what about can AI help make marketing more personal like sending the right message to the right kind of patient at the right time because that's like smart marketing like smart marketing you know if you can get
• 32:30 - 33:00 a message in front of the right patient at the right time most of us just send an email out to the whole list and say oh today we're talking about a bluff and not everybody needs a bluff you know can AI help with that because if so that could be a game changer oh it it definitely can um the the key is to provided examples so if you're using chat GBT if you have one of these paid monthly accounts don't assume that you can write a oneshot prompt and have it do everything if you give it examples it
• 33:00 - 33:30 does much much better so in the case of assisting writing an email to a patient you want to feed it some past emails that you know are good and then you want to prompt it with some of the facts that are in the patient email and then you want it to write so u there's a type of prompting called tree of knowledge where you basically work it like you're growing a tree of knowledge and because it remembers the whole chat history as you go starting with some basic information then some examples then
• 33:30 - 34:00 short example of what you want then do the thing is a great strategy that's such a good point i have um the longer I've had mine the and the more it gets to know me the absolutely the content is so much better yeah um I forgot to ask about phones because so many practices have phone issues um gosh the phone's ringing at the front the front desk is answering the phones checking people in checking them out um handling the skincare um it's just too much going on at the front desk i think AI could be a
• 34:00 - 34:30 gamecher if we could figure that out do you have any suggestions for that or do do you send the phones to the Philippines or do you just I mean what do you do you know um I do have some suggestions i mean yes phones are always a struggle um everyone I think knows the advice that your your office needs to be responding to the phones in quickly in order to turn a question into a lead and into a consult and if you have a delay time or a lag there it really hurts you so before I give any advice don't
• 34:30 - 35:00 introduce something that slows down that process uh you want to only introduce things that can speed it up or if you're already fast enough can make it uh easier but one thing you could do today if you don't have phone scripts for certain situations is to ask AI to generate a phone script for you you may have some training data you could use as an example you may not it would be fine to ask the AI to give you its opinion of what should a transcript be for a two-minute conversation with somebody
• 35:00 - 35:30 calling with this question u then you'll have transcripts you'll have something your staff has not been using before uh and that that's something you can do right now the second thing um is turning on call recording uh you need to know your state laws you need to be using uh call tracking or or phone numbers capable of being recorded and that is a complicated setup so that's way beyond what we'll talk about today but many of the folks listening will have some type of call tracking or call
• 35:30 - 36:00 recording option available it just may not be turned on so I would suggest you turn on call recording and you turn on the transcripts from those phone calls because that is the key to the AI providing real assistance uh in the phone call process and you can start building that archive right now now an AI that actually manages the phone or uh does something on the phone call we're a little ways from that working um there
• 36:00 - 36:30 are some technology problems i think it's going to be you know EMR and larger software vendors that have to combine their technology with the phone tracking technology to make it work i I hope they they work on that i I would say the phones are probably the number one challenge for getting to a a converted surgery just answer the darn phone or if you can't answer it what's plan B you know then what's plan C um phones are a
• 36:30 - 37:00 big deal i on the one hand people say to me "Oh we we have to have a human answer the phone." But then you have to have a human there you know and if they're not if they're busy um and you get the answering machine and you get that phone tree from hell i'm telling you the patient with a credit card you're turning them off so I would figure that out um I was just at a meeting and we were talking about um a couple of practices were using AI but they were um sending it over to the Philippines so first it was AI and then if they couldn't answer the Philippines were
• 37:00 - 37:30 answering the phones but then the accents were way more than they expected and you just the quality control but I love the accountability of recording calls no matter who's answering the phone absolutely somebody should be spot-checking how do your phone sound you know and um don't assume anything you know i have never shared a call log with a client and had them not immediately want to talk to me in detail shocked about the results this includes
• 37:30 - 38:00 you know the very best practices in the country you learn something every single time so if somebody listening has the ability to record calls and you're not doing it please turn it on you'll you'll you'll immediately be able to tune your business in the way that you can like you're caring for a patient and their complications and it's not about you know um reprimanding anybody it's about training people and there's nothing better than hearing yourself on the phone and of course you're cringing because but then I say well you didn't tell them you didn't frame them you didn't give them
• 38:00 - 38:30 you know the scripts to get through these this phone call sounding like a professional so it's all good it really is it becomes this so um disciplinary thing and it's not it's just training and being a professional and and rising to better standards than you have right now um back to the numbers what else can AI track in a practice that's probably not be tracked not being tracked very well now well it can analyze anything that you're tracking now u so in in an
• 38:30 - 39:00 AI uh product some of the models are what's called multimodal and if you see the word multimodal it just means it's capable of receiving or generating things other than text it could be generating speech could be generating images could be generating video in the future so you need a multimodal model to do some of the things that I'm about to describe but if you can take a screenshot you can get AI to analyze your current business data so uh it will take a screenshot from Google Analytics and tell you what it thinks it means it
• 39:00 - 39:30 will take a screenshot from QuickBooks and tell you what it thinks it means it will take a screenshot of your EMR of course don't show pace information if you're we're talking about but if if you're looking at a top level report it can analyze anything that you have today you should play with those things it can also track some of the KPIs that we already know are very important so in terms of visibility it's search impressions or
• 39:30 - 40:00 top of the funnel impressions or eyeballs interacting with your brand and those search impressions if we're talking about Google are revealed in Google Search Console you can give AI access to Google Search Console that's not a insignificant uh setup but it's also not too hard in social media we're talking about reach so if you want an AI to you know interpret the reach of your social media post that is possible today um but you should be tracking both uh
• 40:00 - 40:30 the metrics that you should have some of them are the same things that the AI should have it needs to know how open is the top of your funnel and are you listed when someone looks for something is how you measure that then the number of sessions or visits you're receiving you know to some of your content deeper down the funnel that's really important for the AI to have as a data point you already have that if you're using Google Analytics for you already have that in the interfaces if you're running paid ads or anything like that and then the a number of leads you have your own lead
• 40:30 - 41:00 information we just talked about call recording if you turn that on and have transcripts you have the actual call and if it's a web form or a chat session you have that so these are things that AI can start to cross reference uh and perform analysis from you and in the beginning it can be one-off experiments where you upload some of these things and ask it for how could this be better and it will suggest things that can be better uh what's coming down the pipe are AIs that can choose their own tools
• 41:00 - 41:30 just six months ago it was very difficult to get an AI to consistently look up a URL and know that it looked at the web page and it wasn't just hallucinating about what a web page like that might have been uh today many of these models will look up a URL every time and check the content you're asking it to check so a a model that can choose its own tools sort of spin up an agent that's an expert at Google Analytics or spin up an agent that's an expert at QuickBooks exports u those things are
• 41:30 - 42:00 going to be at your disposal pretty quickly and that's another reason to be learning AI today um but and then the final the final number is cost per lead if you don't know your cost per lead from a particular marketing channel well some of the things I just said you you know you divide cost by number of inquiries from that channel and you have your cost per lead number and uh any practice that doesn't have true ROI hasn't mapped out their whole uh marketing system from the value of of the actual surgery back to where it came
• 42:00 - 42:30 from online you're not alone the vast majority of practices are in that same boat cost per lead is a nice kind of napkin level number that levels the playing field because if you're considering doing some marketing and the uh billboard company is telling you that at this intersection it'll generate this many calls and the billboard is only $6,000 a month so that'll be you know x dollars per lead well if you know that your you know your paid ads from Google are $100 per lead you don't have to do
• 42:30 - 43:00 the billboard because you could just increase your ad spend in Google i'm not asking you to do that but that that's how this cost per lead number really helps the AI can help you make those judgment calls um so those are four metrics and they're four metrics that I think you can get to an AI today you'll definitely be able to get it into an AI within six months mhm so then that's all so far AI has been fantastic love it you're loving it we're using it but what are the downsides to AI or where do you see some
• 43:00 - 43:30 of the like negative consequences that could happen with AI and with our industry well u there's several the first is big picture when we're using AI let's not kid ourselves about what it is designed to do it is designed to replace human labor well you know I run a marketing agency i have an excellent team that I've carefully assembled so we can deliver a certain level of work at a certain volume and I don't necessarily want to
• 43:30 - 44:00 replace the whole team uh I think most of you listening are the same way in your office and you want lower office overhead but you don't necessarily want it to be an office of one where the AI does everything for you and you just show up to do the operation i mean I'm speaking for some of you but some would love that yeah some would love that it's designed to replace labor that has a downside where does the replace labor go in the marketplace what do they do that
• 44:00 - 44:30 affects the overall economy that affects people's spending power that affects the amount of surgery they buy if a if a large chunk of society is displaced then just it's a complicated future picture uh and even if your business runs really efficiently using these tools the fact that across the whole economy it is literally replacing labor uh you know we don't know if that decreases or increases overall spending in the economy the second thing is medical related it really has to be HIPPA
• 44:30 - 45:00 compliant and HIPPA compliance also you know is a set of technical standards and legal standards when we evaluate software tools we have seen many that say they're HIPACO compliant and when we look closely at their architecture they're what I would call mostly HIPPA compliant like they're HIPPA compliant but they'll let the surgeon request an email of the data on the back end and that email is not secure so they're HIPPA compliance they're you want to make sure it is not just checking the box but they actually take security of
• 45:00 - 45:30 patient information seriously once you know that something is HIPACO compliant and a downside of that being penalties and patient information exposed and you know not a good situation but even beyond HIPPA compliance who owns this information uh some of these software service companies want to own all the information about the doctor patient relationship so that they can be the ones that own the database back in the
• 45:30 - 46:00 beginning I talked about making your own store of data having your own filing cabinet of information you've gathered over the years that's very important who owns the information all of the all of the tracking of a Google ad campaign is owned by Google so they are learning over time from all of our experiences placing ads and seeing conversion rates and testing copy and they use that to make themselves more money so some of the software tool companies whether it's a chatbot or a phone answering service
• 46:00 - 46:30 or a straighten out your back-end accounting type uh model if you read their uh terms very carefully you may see that they're going to take some of your information store in the cloud they're going to own the cloud they're going to own that information and that should make you hesitate it wouldn't make me always say no but you need to be very conscious of who now owns this information and down the road who gets to benefit from it if you're just going to take all of your call transcripts feed it into a service that is going to run AI on top of
• 46:30 - 47:00 them train the perfect autoresponders but then sell those autoresponders to all of your competitors maybe that's not a win uh so that's a downside of when you give up ownership of the information you're storing it has future consequences other people can build tools on top of it other people can contact the names in the database all of those things i always want our practices to own as much of the patient relationship as possible and practical i I know that an individual practice is not going to
• 47:00 - 47:30 build a giant software system to own as much information as a call tracking vendor but you want to own as much of it as you can and then you want to keep that in your data warehouse and then you get to call the shots later how do you know if you own it or not do you have to read a contract and read like is there a special place that it or special words they use to say who owns it you'll see the words license in these documents sometimes you'll see uh information about where it is stored or how it is stored um it'll be in the
• 47:30 - 48:00 service agreement with the software company it's something you can ask in every sales call and depending on the training of the salesperson demoing the tool they'll either be able to say yes I have an answer or I'll have to get back to you um but yeah it it's something you should ask in every sales call i think you should ask but then read the fine print i don't know if the sales people even know about this um one one downside that I see coming from the patient point of view is just the taking out the personalization of this because um
• 48:00 - 48:30 plastic surgery is a really emotional journey and um if you we keep taking out the human side and it becomes it will become very commoditized because now you're not different than anyone else or your chatbot is better than the other person's chatbot um there's still a big human component to what we do so I would be very careful and balance humans versus machine just to um preserve that relationship that you're trying to build
• 48:30 - 49:00 with the patient you know uh definitely and you you want to take your most talented staff and put them in front of your future patients and that includes you and your your bedside manner ai will open up some opportunities but it doesn't remove that you've got talented staff and you yourself are talented and you want that talent on display at just the right moment in the journey of each of these patients yeah well this has been fantastic um uh Clark how can surgeons
• 49:00 - 49:30 learn more about AI um because it does keep changing um I think you're going to have a resource for them can you tell us about that yeah I'm gonna I put up a little page on cake websites it's just cake websites.comai and I put a little form up just for folks who watch this podcast and I'll share some of the resources that uh I haven't necessarily said out loud in this uh interview some specific examples of some of these things that anyone could benefit from knowing about
• 49:30 - 50:00 i'll list a few of my favorite YouTubers as well and a few of my favorite authoritative sources this stuff is changing so fast and the practice I have adopted is to experiment frequently by using these tools but to follow the people that I have found generate the most trusted content and actually show themselves doing it so I follow men are speaking as few people as possible but they're as good as I can find and I'll share some
• 50:00 - 50:30 of that list with anyone who wants it and that way you're not just delued with uh you won't believe what happens next type headlines on YouTube as you research these things right all right so the website is cake websites.com because if you put in cake websites I've never seen so many cakes in my life um so you know it'll keep showing you cakes so you have to put in cakes website cakeebsites.comai
• 50:30 - 51:00 yeah okay thank you so much Clark i really appreciate it and everybody that's going to wrap it up for us today i hope you got a lot of value out of this if you did please subscribe to Beauty and the Biz and of course share it with your friends colleagues and staff and then if you've got any questions for me or any feedback please leave them on my website at katherineley.com or you can certainly DM me on Instagram at katherinembba thanks so much and we will talk again soon the fastest way to success is to model other successful surgeons who have what you want but you
• 51:00 - 51:30 can only see their results not the path they took to get there so you continue to jump from one thing to another hoping to find something that will work for you too but it rarely does so try this shortcut instead it's guaranteed to move you forward i compiled my intellectual property to grow cosmetic revenues everything I've gleaned over the years into one playbook of the most successful practices and what they do to win go to cosmeticpracticevault.com and let's grow your cosmetic revenues
• 51:30 - 52:00 [Music]