Shorr Solutions: The Podcast – Ep. 149 – Setting Expectations Before You Make Your Next Hire

00:00:04:06 – 00:00:56:19
Paige Hamilton
You’re listening to Shorr Solutions: The Podcast where our expert consulting team steps behind the mic to share some of the strategies and solutions we implement for static practices nationwide. With decades of combined experience running and coaching aesthetic and medical practices. We bring you the guidance that strengthens operations, elevates profitability, and supports long term growth. This is where solutions begin. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Shorr Solutions: The Podcast. My name is Paige Hamilton. I am the marketing and advertising manager here at Shorr Solutions. And today I’m joined by Cristian Devoz, who is one of our partners and a Senior Client Success Manager. So today we’re going to be talking about defining the role of AI on your team. So welcome Cristian.

00:00:56:21 – 00:01:14:16
Cristian Devoz
Thank you. Hi. It’s a pleasure to be here. And honestly, looking at you and I’m so proud to see how much you have grown in the last few years from an intern. And now, you know, you’re host in the podcast, and it’s, rewarding to see. So thank you. Thank you for having me as a guest.

00:01:14:18 – 00:03:33:21
Paige Hamilton
Well, thanks for saying that. This is going to be a fun conversation. Cristian and I both use AI quite often to help us in our roles. So we figured that addressing the role of AI for esthetic practices is equally as important, because many practices or adding AI tools, it’s new technology. So being able to find ways to hopefully improve your staff’s challenges that they’re facing or just improve day to day tasks. So this episode is going to be about treating AI the same way you would treat a new hire on your team. So clearly defining its roles, responsibilities, and limits. If you’ve seen the last episode, we’ve already talked about all of the things that you need to do before hiring and having that clear role defined. A lot of that will apply to this as well, but this episode is going to be more. AI specific and driven. So first to get started, I want to talk about some of the different types of AI that you can use in an aesthetic medical practice. We obviously have ChatGPT, which is probably the most well known, and AI system that as well as Gemini and Claude, our large language learning model AI. So they are constantly learning, getting new knowledge, pulling information from Google and other browsers. Then of course, we have AI powered phone agents that can answer your phone for you. We have automated patient engagement and management systems generative AI, so you can use it in your marketing. Then in the practice you also might have AI powered skin analysis, diagnostics, 3D imaging, and even outcome simulators. So these are all different types of AI technology that you might have in your practice already or you might be considering. So Cristian, I want to turn it over to you and let’s talk about why practices turn to AI when things feel difficult or just because it’s new right now.

00:03:33:23 – 00:05:59:15
Cristian Devoz
Well, I think that I can compare how AI is being implemented in practices right now to when people switch from paper charts to digital charts, and up to this day, I think that there may still be some practices that I still use. Paper charts. Don’t let yourself be the paper chart practice when it comes to AI. That’s the best comparison I can come up with, because you got to learn how to harness the power of AI in your practice, and you mentioned several ways that it could be used at practice. But the key before you start using any of them is defining what’s your strategy, what’s going to be the role that AI is going to play? Is it going to be all of the ones that you mentioned Paige or is it just going to be a couple of them? And it also depends on what type of practice you have. For example, we have a an allergist who uses AI for his notetaking when it comes to taking his soap notes. So that’s how he uses AI, and sometimes he even uses AI when it comes to, you know, coming up with creative and proper ways to respond to reviews, especially when they are bad reviews. How do you respond to those in a way that is going to help alleviate that discomfort from that specific patient? So he uses it in these ways and many other ways, but those are some of the ones that he has recently started using, because we have seen in the last couple of years how quickly all these AI models and all these different, you know, new technologies are coming along. It is so fast, that is so hard to keep up with it. And you have to constantly be updating yourself and learning about these new, you know, platforms in new ways of using AI. To the point where I would honestly say that there is no such thing as an AI expert when it comes to implementing some of these technologies, because the moment you learn how to do something, there is something new ready, and you have to learn that. So we’re all just trying to experiment with it and to learn it as we go. With that being said, with the increase of, you know, the accuracy of these AI models, being able to generate images and videos is becoming even a potential risk for your personal information and for your image online. So we’ll have to see, wait and see how that develops, but is definitely a concern for the future when it comes to privacy and when it comes to, you know, what’s real and what’s not.

00:05:59:17 – 00:07:16:12
Paige Hamilton
That’s a good point, Cristian, that you’re bringing up as well about privacy. Because if you’re going to be using AI in your practice, make sure that it’s HIPAA compliant, especially it’s you’re going to be using it for patients. Read all of the terms or do more research and make sure that if you’re uploading a picture and it’s going to show you what the results of your procedure would look like. Make sure that it’s not disclosing that image anywhere you know you want it to stay within HIPAA and be protected. So that’s something else to keep in mind. Also, you know, if you’re using it for your CRM and your leads that are coming in are being filtered through this because that’s another way you can use it, you know, making sure your leads are being followed up with. And it’s all being able to have an automation set up so you know when to contact them next. If that name is in the system, you need to make sure that it’s being protected and it’s not going to be shared anywhere else. So that’s something else to keep in mind when you’re using AI, make sure that the AI you’re using is going to protect that information, and that just might mean upgrading from the free account to a paid business account.

00:07:16:14 – 00:08:25:10
Cristian Devoz
Definitely. And before you even use any of these AIs for anything where you’re going to be putting information from your staff and from your patients, I will be very, very careful to make sure that you are compliant, as you mentioned, and that you do not use the free version 100%. It’s very interesting because I was watching a video in TikTok and it’s this guy, they’re in a meeting and it looks like a corporate meeting, and then suddenly the guy takes off his shirt and he starts flexing. He has like massive muscles, but it’s actually somebody got into the meeting. You know, they hacked into the meeting and then took the picture of these guy and then use that to generate the video. And then the person that was in the meeting is like, why are you doing that in the meeting? And he said, no, no, no, that’s not me. That’s not me. And it was so crazy that, you know, there are so many risks involved with privacy and making sure that you’re protected when it comes to using AI. So whenever you’re using it, either to create, for example, employee performance reviews, just don’t put information about the employee. Make sure that you actually put in like I’m going to do a review. These are the information I need you to help me create or to analyze or whatever, but don’t give actual, you know, PHI protect the health information.

00:08:25:12 – 00:10:14:07
Paige Hamilton
So now let’s start talking about how to actually define the role on your team, because we’ve discussed multiple ways you can use it. But what we want to be clear about, we’ve mentioned making sure that it’s HIPAA compliant, but also making sure that you have clearly defined roles for specific team members. So let’s say that you’re using ChatGPT for, your marketing team. So I use it all the time to help with marketing initiatives and either coming up with content or, you know, sometimes even using it to create videos and generate different content. So just having the defined role of who’s using it and who can change it, who can do different prompts, because we also use a system called Monday.com, which is our project management software. So we have a lot of automation set up. And automations are AI as well part of this technology, because you can use these automations to pull certain information and then either create tasks or, you know, after a certain amount of time is passed to send you an email notification as a reminder or a follow up. So who is able to edit that automation? You know, you don’t want to give everybody access to your workflows because that might create confusion. If someone feels, oh, I can go in and I can edit this, and then they end up messing something up that is, you know, running your whole practice or running part of a system in your practice. So, Cristian, let’s talk about how unclear AI usage mirrors unclear job roles.

00:10:14:09 – 00:11:55:13
Cristian Devoz
Absolutely. Well, here comes the the key. When it comes to clarity, you cannot just expect people to figure out how are you supposed to be? In other words, you shouldn’t communicate clearly. You know that people understand. You should communicate clearly enough that they don’t misunderstand. So having the proper outlines, who can use it? When can they use it? How can they use it for web purposes? So making sure that you have all of those details and that is written down, and that whenever you’re giving that person, that employee the responsibility, their job description, including their if they’re going to be handling your marketing, they can use this specific AI in this specific manner. You know, making sure that they avoid putting patient information or specific, you know, protect the health information. And just being very detailed about how is it going to be able to be used and which platform and and to what end. So once you have those things detail, you will make sure that there is no misunderstanding when it comes to how the staff is supposed to use and who is supposed to use it. Because that’s the other thing, is something goes wrong. You want to be able to know who did it and how it happened. So you should be able to have the clear policies of what needs to be done, how it will be done, and what to avoid doing. Because I think that sometimes it’s easier to tell people what not to do, as opposed to telling them all the ways that they can use, AI, which you will do the best you can to outline those. And as more AI comes out or more platforms come out, you want to make sure that you continue to update yourself and update those policies so that they can still be safe to use and compliant.

00:11:55:15 – 00:15:03:13
Paige Hamilton
Something else that I think kind of goes along with what you’re saying as well is, you know, you mentioned making sure the right people are using AI and for the right things. I think it’s also important to make sure that if you have a very general AI software that can be used for multiple different things, as Christian said, defining what to use it for because maybe there is something that you want to keep a human component to, because that’s very important as well. In an aesthetic practice where you want to have that five star patient experience it, then you’re using AI kind of as a shortcut to replace the human side of things. Then maybe that’s deteriorating your patient experience a little bit. So there are certain things that you want to keep clearly defined as this will be for AI, because it’s going to help you with your job, not replace you in your job. So I think that’s a clear defining element as well, is it’s an enhancement to what you do, not a replacement for what you do, even if a task you have can be replaced using AI, there should still be that level of checking it as well. You know, if you’re having it, create something for you. If you’re having it, create a document for you that you’re going to be giving to your patients. You don’t want it to just create the document and then you print it out right away. You need to still make sure that you sit there. You review it. You you know, you’re making edits, you’re adding more information if necessary, different things like that. As an example, just making sure that you’re still having that patient experience and keeping that, level of like intimacy that you would have in that level of connection and communication, like, for example, using AI on the phones, that might be a great thing to implement. You know, maybe it’s your front desk, your director, first impressions. If they don’t answer by the third ring, then the phone call goes to an AI who answers. Maybe they start to walk them through something until that person becomes available, but I wouldn’t have it. Just answer right away because then people are going to be, oh well, like I wanted to talk to somebody. You know, a lot of times people prefer to actually talk to a human, or you have the people who sit there and they’re on the phone and they’re just saying like, no, let me talk to a person, give me an agent or something along those lines, rather than having to explain themselves to AI and then once again to a human or something else, you could say is maybe your system allows you to do like AI callbacks, meaning you don’t. You say you know, it can answer the phone after the third ring, but you’re not using AI to like, call someone back. That should be a human element. So there’s just like that differentiation of AI doesn’t have that same level of human touch, the judgment, the culture, the patient experience?

00:15:03:15 – 00:15:28:15
Cristian Devoz
Right now? With that said, Paige, you should still train your people so that they do have the human touch, because I can tell you, some people don’t have that human touch and they are very transactional. So you’re going to be very careful even with things like that, like if you’re going to be using a human being for certain tasks, they should be properly trained to know how to handle that task and to do it, you know, exceptionally well.

00:15:28:17 – 00:15:34:12
Paige Hamilton
An your AI should be trained to as much as you’re training your. Yeah, the human as well?

00:15:34:14 – 00:17:09:12
Cristian Devoz
Yeah. It’s like another employee. You mentioned that at the beginning. Right. So you should definitely train your AI anyways. But the other thing is that even if you train the AI, which, you know, you can totally train them and, and I have seen these done in other organizations where they take all these data, of calls because they call that their employees or their exceptional employees have had. And then they take all of those and put it into an AI model, and they create these virtual agents. And then the AI can be at a level similar and consistent with what those employees are doing. So it can be done. But it does take a lot of gathering data, making sure that you have the proper protocols in place and that you actually have, you know, the knowledge that you need to train the the AI. Now, there are some companies out there that are actually helping businesses generate AI agents, but not all of them necessarily know what they’re doing. Some of them kind of serve as the middleman where there is a bigger company that provides the services, and then they sell these to you, and then the, you know, use that or the company’s software to generate the agents. But they are just a middleman per se, as opposed to like the source. So it’s very important that you once again train your people and train your AI, and then understand to what extent you’re going to train it. And even though it can be done that you could have, you know, these virtual agent handle calls doesn’t mean that you should. So you should still be very conscious of the decisions that you’re going to make and to what extent you want to make them.

00:17:09:14 – 00:17:32:22
Paige Hamilton
And I think that it all kind of comes full circle. Like we’re saying, it’s making sure you’re thinking through everything. So if you already have AI in your practice, think through what you actually use it for and whether or not the systems that you use it for makes sense. If you’re considering adding a new. I make sure that from the beginning you have it clearly defined.

00:17:32:22 – 00:18:19:03
Paige Hamilton
So, you know, different things we’ve talked about or the different softwares that you can use it for. There’s a lot of different things like in the back end, like smaller things that you can have it do. So whether or not you want to have AI into your phone all the time as backup or never, that’s something. But then also, you know, the smaller things, kind of like Cristian had mentioned earlier with one of our client, he uses it for transcriptions.

00:17:58:22 – 00:18:19:03
Paige Hamilton
So maybe you want to have AI running in the background of your calls, and it’s just going to transcribe the calls for you, so then you can have notes for it afterwards. So there’s a lot of things to consider with all of this new technology. And Cristian mentioned it earlier, is that it’s always changing and it’s hard to keep up with sometimes.

00:18:19:05 – 00:18:46:05
Paige Hamilton
But finding what works for your practice and figuring out what area you want to use it for. Do you want to use it for marketing? Do you want to use it for leads? To want to use it for phone calls? Do you want to use it for transcriptions? Document creation? You can use it for training. You can create different systems where maybe your team is able to sit down and role play with AI or get reports.

00:18:46:05 – 00:18:49:07
Paige Hamilton
As Cristian said, you could do your performance reviews using it.

00:18:49:07 – 00:20:43:06
Cristian Devoz
I think about the things that you want to automate, the things that you want to be able to enhance in your practice, the systems that you’re missing or that you feel that could be improved. Then talk about which, yeah, you’re going to use. So do your research. Make sure that is Hipa compliant. Microsoft 365 is hyper compliant and even that sometimes has issues. And I have seen a couple of times people say, you know, there was a breach or, you know, you might have to update your passwords, whatever it might be, but just in general, get the best that you can get and then make sure that you have your proper cybersecurity insurance. So if something does happen, you have a way for you to remediate those situations. And just a final thought, look at it as your personal assistant even in your daily lives. And I use it for a lot of different things where that’s for planning in my own personal life, to help me analyze certain things in my numbers, to help me, you know, come up with different ideas when it comes to, you know, maybe I’m working on an assignment, a college or something of that nature. You can help me generate ideas and help me do research. But at the end of the day, look at it as a tool, not as the end product, because you’re still going to have to take those ideas and create your own thing, or, you know, take that initial draft and then make edits to make it yours, to make it sound like you, to make sure that it’s still sounding like a human being and then necessarily like a generated piece of content. So make sure that once again, you do your research the best that you can get, had the proper policies, and then finally look at it as your personal assistant to help you, you know, get to that next level, save you time, save your money. At the end of the day, help you become more efficient and successful.

00:20:43:08 – 00:23:59:08
Paige Hamilton
I do want to share just one more story to wrap up as well. So as much as AI can be your assistant as Cristian saying and it’s all good, make sure that before you implement anything, you’re talking to your staff as well and making sure that this is actually something that will be beneficial whatever platform that you’re using. Because a lot of times I can be very well promoted, and it seems like it’s going to be very beneficial. It’s going to save you all this time. Maybe you as the doctor, practice administrator, practice manager, you think that this is going to be the best thing for your team, and you spend all this research on it, all this money, paying for it and implementing it and creating all that stuff. And then it gets to your team and they’re like, well, wait, this is way more complicated than how we were doing it originally. How we did it work. You know, it’s that don’t fix it if it’s not broken. And I have a very good example with that. So like I mentioned, we use Monday.com for all of our, all of our information it internally essentially. So it’s our project management platform. We use it to manage all of our client accounts. We used to manage all of our internal processes. So we have a board set up where we have all of the tasks for our clients month to month while we have it here. And then we also have individual client boards. So I went through and I created an automation. So that way when one task was marked complete, it would create a copy and it would send it to this other board and on this other board. Then it was marked complete. But once I implemented that, I was like, wait, this is going to make it so much easier for the team because it’s only two buttons instead of five clicks. But they found they had told me afterwards they were like, Paige, this is creating so much more work for us because things are transferring properly. Now we’re having to copy the notes from here and put it over on this board. And you know, so I then revert to the old system. So something that I had implemented that I thought was going to be better didn’t actually end up going better for the team. So now we have to work through, you know, the limitations that the notes didn’t transfer. Maybe that’s an upgrade that it’s going to get later. And we can re retry it down the line. But make sure that you’re getting feedback from your team on these new systems as well, because you don’t want to frustrate your team by implementing all this new technology. You think it’s going to be making their life easier when It’s really making it difficult. So it can be your personal assistant and it can make your life much easier. But if you’re not using it properly or for the right reason, it could end up making your life a little bit more challenging as well. So make sure you’re looking at it from all ends. And just to wrap up, we’ve said it already, but if AI is part of your practice, make sure that you are clear why you what the role is. You know, because like I just said, if it’s not defined, it might be creating as much noise as it is. Help and anything else Cristian that you have to add to wrap up this episode?

00:23:59:10 – 00:25:35:11
Cristian Devoz
Absolutely. I guess just to kind of wrap up what you were saying, I would say don’t get confused in that fine line between my team doesn’t want change to my team. You know, it’s what they have is working. Let’s not fix that. If if it ain’t broken. I mean, there is a fine line right there. If it is something that is taking away too much time from your team, you definitely want to change it. You definitely want to streamline it. And you will have to get your team on board with those changes. And and they have to understand that part of change is uncomfortable, but they will get there and at the end of the day is going to save you time once they already know how to use it, once they are trained and educated on it. So don’t feel like your team not being able to be on on. It means that you shouldn’t implement AI in certain things. It just means that you have to, you know, consider is a worth changing that system. If we’re not going to be saving a lot of time, if I’m going to be saving, you know, maybe a few seconds or a few minutes, per day, then it’s not as worth it. Maybe it’s something else that might need your attention to save an hour or two hours a day. So you got to analyze and see what’s beneficial for you at the end of the day, and then just make sure that you understand that line between, you know, these this is people being uncomfortable to change. And then these people just is working as it is is not a big deal. That is going to make you save a lot of time necessarily. So let’s leave it as it is. So you have to know when to do what.

00:25:35:13 – 00:26:13:00
Paige Hamilton
And with that, if you have any questions about AI or how we use it, how you could be using it, we would love to talk to you. You can schedule a free consult to meet with us and our team, and we can answer any additional questions that you might have come up with while we’ve been talking. We also have a lot of other episodes where on episode 150 with this one. So lots of other good content for you to go take a look at. There will be links in the description to schedule a free consult. If you would like. And with that, thank you for joining us on this episode of Shorr Solutions: The Podcast. We’ll see you next time.

00:26:13:02 – 00:26:30:07
Paige Hamilton
New episodes are released every two weeks, offering perspective on the decisions, systems, and leadership behind woven practices or continued insight between episodes. Follow us on social media at Shaw Solutions. This is Shorr Solutions: The Podcast.