AI and Wellbeing in Veterinary Medicine | Episode 77 | Reviving Vet Med

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming veterinary medicine, from enhancing diagnostics to streamlining workflows. But what does this mean for the wellbeing of veterinary professionals?

In this insightful episode, we chat with Dr. Christopher Pinard, veterinary oncologist, CEO and co-founder of ANI.ML Health Inc., and leader in AI innovation for veterinary and comparative oncology. Chris shares how emerging AI technologies like machine learning, spatial computing, and ChatBots are shaping the future of veterinary care.

Beyond the tech, we explore how AI can support mental health and wellbeing in a profession often challenged by stress and burnout. Chris discusses practical ways veterinary teams can embrace technology thoughtfully without losing the compassion and human connection at the heart of their work.

Whether you’re excited or cautious about AI’s growing role in vet med, this conversation offers balanced insights on harnessing innovation to improve both patient outcomes and practitioner resilience.

Tune in to learn how technology and wellbeing can go hand in hand in veterinary medicine’s evolving landscape.

Watch the Video Version of this Episode
https://youtu.be/abqvhq__xC8 

Resources
Follow Christopher Pinard and his company ANI.ML on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-pinard-a96a4b49/ and https://www.linkedin.com/company/animlhealth/ 

Learn more about ANI.ML Health: https://www.animl.health/ 

Follow ANI.ML Health on social media @animl_health

Randomized Trial of a Generative AI Chatbot for Mental Health Treatment (article): https://ai.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/AIoa2400802?download=true 

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Transcript

Dr. Marie Holowaychuk - Hi everyone, it's Dr. Marie Holowaychuk here. If you're like me and love staying up to date on what's happening in Vet Med beyond just cases and clinical pearls, you'll want to check out What's Up Doc, the new podcast from Scribenote, hosted by Dr. Katie Gallagher, veterinarian and co-founder of Scribenote, what's Up Doc dives into the real conversations happening in our industry, from the latest trends in tech to mental health and the everyday challenges veterinary professionals face. I had the chance to be a guest on the show to talk about all things veterinary wellbeing and trust me, it's not your average vet med podcast. So wherever you listen to your podcasts, search Whats Up Doc by Scribenote, hit follow and join the conversation. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Reviving Vet Met.

Dr. Marie -  Today we're stepping into the fascinating intersection of vet medicine, technology and wellbeing. Our guest is Dr. Christopher Pinard, a veterinary medical oncologist based in Toronto and the CEO and co-founder of ani.ml  Health Inc. Chris is deeply involved in advancing AI driven platforms to improve cancer diagnostics in dogs and cats, leveraging cutting edge technologies like spatial computing, 3D modeling and machine learning.  Beyond his clinical and research work, Chris is a leader in several AI and oncology working groups, bridging the  gap between technology and compassionate veterinary care. In this episode, we dive into how AI is reshaping vet  medicine and importantly, how these innovations can impact the mental health and wellbeing of veterinary  professionals. We discuss the promise and challenges of integrating AI tools, including chatbots and into clinical practice and mental health care. 

Dr. Marie -  Whether you're excited or cautious about AI, this conversation offers thoughtful insights on how technology can  support vets without losing the heart of the profession. So let's get into this timely and inspiring discussion with  Dr. Christopher Pinard. This is the Reviving Vet Med podcast and I'm your host, Dr. Marie Holowaychuck. My mission is to improve the mental health and wellbeing of veterinary professionals around the world. All right. Hello Chris, thanks so much for being here with me today. It's great to chat with you. 

Dr. Christopher Pinard -  Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here. 

Dr. Marie -  Yeah, well, we've got a great, bunch of questions here that I'm excited to dive into. I wonder if you could start by  sharing how you became interested in the role that AI can play in vet medicine and what excites you most about  the intersection between AI and veterinary care.

 Dr. Christopher -  Yes, going back. Back to like being a young kid. I've always just been a nerd and so like I always love playing video  games and coding and you know, even back to my grade school days I was doing HTML and stuff. So I've just always been a nerd at heart and loved anything related to computers. But I actually kind of moved away from that for a  long period of time, obviously through studies. I was trained at the University of Guelph, did my residency at the  University of Guelph as a practicing medical oncologist now, but outside and very luckily after my residency, I had  the privilege of actually doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Sunnybrook Research Institute Human Hospital here in Toronto in the Tran lab. 

Dr. Christopher -  And I had this opportunity to not only see what they were doing in terms of predictive modeling with women with breast cancer, but also the potential for crossover and comparative AI. And so that really started to pique my interest. That really got me into it. I started taking course after course. I was like addicted to Coursera for a while, took a few things associated with the University of Toronto and that really like kickstarted this journey where now I'm an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph. We've started our own company as well as and our entire research thesis and platform is based on artificial intelligence in vet med, but also with the oncologist lens of how can we utilize AI for the greater good for both species. Humans, dogs, cats, et cetera, pretty much animal species. So I'm really, really excited. 

Dr. Christopher -  I'm scared and excited at the same time, I guess because I think VetMed's at this sort of critical inflection point where we're seeing this huge influx of AI into the market, which is so fun. And as we've seen before, AI is a great stomping ground to innovate, try new things. There's less guardrails and less issues trying to implement things. But that's also a double edged sword and we've got to be really careful and hopefully we can touch on a few points  of that today. But I think it's going to do a lot with the topic of your podcast, obviously and all the wonderful work that you do. I think there's actually another critical inflection point of how we are going to see the same way that AI has inserted itself into every single person's day to day life. 

Dr. Christopher -  We're going to see that integrated into our mental wellbeing, our ability to get home sooner. A whole bunch of utilities that AI brings to the table. 

Dr. Marie -  Oh my gosh, so many things to talk about. And what an amazing journey that's taken you here. And has combined passions. I'm so interested to hear from you. You know, when it comes to diagnostics and treatment, what is the role that AI is playing in terms of like intersecting with medical oncology or clinical practice and. Yeah. Any examples from the real world that you can share to highlight the benefits? 

Dr. Christopher -  Yeah, absolutely. I think there's like I always talk about, whenever I give a talk about AI really like the three pillars which is diagnosis, treatment and prognosis associated with AI. And that's because AI can be used as a diagnostic assistant. It can be used for predicting, you know, treatment response, which is what we're seeing a lot in the human space. Some of the work we did in the pathology lab was could you actually predict what women are going to respond to X protocol compared to another protocol? That sort of treatment based response then lays into prognosis, which is, you know, the detection of survival based on a multitude of factors. So I think that's really where Vet Med is going to go. We're not quite there yet, but we are. We're already seeing some of this start to crawl out of the woodwork. 

Dr. Christopher -  And so at the very basic level, which seems crazy, but at the very basic level we're using AI on a diagnostic realm, not even just in oncology, but see all these platforms coming out for helping read radiographs, helping read ultrasound or ct. Just reading a paper a few minutes ago that was auto segmenting nodules in the lung parenchyma. And so all these kinds of things are starting to come out and we're seeing them commercially available. So that's going to help people that don't have access to a specialist or don't have access to a radiologist or you don't have a thigh kick. So you just want to have that extra layer of confidence. I think there's a lot of benefit there with some caveats, but there's a lot of utility on those other fronts then. 

Dr. Christopher -  And we're seeing predictive algorithms come from Antec and IDEX and some of these other that pertains to critical care medicine, internal medicine, you know, predicting kidney disease with a high fidelity. There's a whole bunch of different ways that this is going to be utilized in the future. But onco-specific, there's one platform right now called Impermed and they've done a lot of great work where they've got a huge data set of dogs with lymphoma and they've done a whole bunch of in vitro assays to look at treatment response. You know, on a cellular level to standard trot protocol as well as other therapies. But then they've got in that data set they use some proprietary algorithms that they actually combine a score and they can predict which patients are going to respond to which part of the protocol and you can make a custom recommendation. 

Dr. Christopher - So that's my very long winded way of saying I think we're about to get to a point where personalized care and personalized medicine is actually going to become really like integrated into our daily lives and not just for oncologists. I think this is going to happen across. 

[08:09] Dr. Marie -  That is so cool. You know, I've heard these murmurings. I've certainly, you know, I know it's been a big point of conversation in the radiology, the diagnostic imaging space, you know, about using AI for diagnosis and so on. I had no idea. And it makes sense. Why wouldn't we use it for predictive algorithms, you know, around prognosis? But I had no idea that we had come so far with that. Yet, you know, when I think of AI from my own personal usage, I think of using transcription software in practice to AI generate my records or my discharge notes or for me too, as an entrepreneur, I use AI as like my little office assistant to, you know, ask questions and help me this. And which of these sound better and how do I. 

Dr. Marie -  What's the layman term for what I'm trying to say or whatever it is. So it's just incredible to see so many, you know, wonderful usages of this beyond vet med. I know you and I have had a conversation independently around AI and mental health and some really interesting papers had come out that you had sent me around chatbots for individuals who are living with mental health challenges and how those can be helpful. I'd love to hear more about the promising ways that you think AI is going to be helping individuals who are living with mental illness or mental health challenges. 

Dr. Christopher - Absolutely. And you know, I can say very openly I'm somebody who has my own mental health challenges as well and I suffer from a multitude of diseases associated with the mental health space. So I think it's actually there's an intrinsic curiosity from my perspective about how things like chatbots might actually help people like us, which honestly I think there's a lot of veterinarians that are introverts or we know autism and spectrum based disorders are all coming to the limelight and we know women in particular are high maskers and that the diagnosis is increasing exponentially. And so I think there's an opportunity here that's going to honestly make life a little bit more livable for a lot of people because they're going to get the support that they need. 

Dr. Christopher -  That would ultimately be, especially here in Canada, sometimes really slow to come to fruition because we just don't have enough people to help. And so I really see AI integrating in a mental health landscape. I want to talk about chatbots, but I think it's sort of a two pronged approach because we all know that the day to day job can be hard. We all know that we're bound with paperwork, we're bound with phone calls. And you already mentioned a great utility of AI scribes which is to help you document your day to day. I've used an AI scribe, you know, when I'm on the phone and it can document everything I've said. Amazing what it does. 

Dr. Christopher -  What's really interesting to me though is there was actually a couple of studies that have come out of the human space and I think there's a few different platforms that, you know, report that, you know, it's a big time save, at least based on the human papers. It's actually not a huge time save. On average it only ends up saving about one to two minutes per clinician. Obviously there's some power users and there's some that are not as good at using it, but I think what it's actually doing, and they report these in a lot of the discussions of these papers is that it's the mental burden. The mental focus is back to the interaction with the patient or in our case the client. 

Dr. Christopher -  And therefore it's just alleviating the fact that you're not thinking about the fact you're gonna have to type that up later. You're in just an organization. So I think that's a really interesting approach to looking at actually mental health in our profession. And I'll be really curious once papers start coming out in our spot. And I know there's a couple people doing it. I've been looking at doing it with a few different folks as well about that integration of AI into the veterinary medicine space and AI scrubs specifically and how that helps individuals on the day to day. And again, I want to reiterate that point. I really think it's the burden that we face. It's not the time saved necessarily. So, so intriguing to me. On the flip side of that, yes, the direct benefit of AI chatbots and other things. 

Dr. Christopher -  The paper that I had sent you and we had talked about before was from the New England Journal of Medicine. They actually have an entire group of papers that is related to AI. So it's an entire issue that is consistently updated over and over specific to AI. So if anybody's interested, they should check that out. I think it's only $30 a month or something to subscribe. I subscribe now. But what was really interesting is it was a group from Massachusetts that basically took a validated therabot is what they called it. And they had a human in the loop, which meant that they had psychologists on board that helped train the model. It was based on hundreds of thousands of hours of real client-patient interaction, or, sorry, client-doctor interaction, as well as medical notes. 

Dr. Christopher -  And what that did is it trained the model specifically, rather than just throwing it into ChatGPT. This is a model that has a very high fidelity at understanding the context of the interaction and what they saw. And they looked 

specifically at depressive disorders, anxiety, as well as eating disorders. Interestingly, eating disorder symptoms were the least reduced out of the whole groups. But after just four weeks of usage, there was a 51% reduction in depressive symptoms with patients interacting with a chatbot. And it honestly caused me to pause for a minute because it's really, really intriguing and there's a really cool diagram in that paper and maybe we could link it in the notes for people to. It shows, over time, sort of a heat map about how much people are interacting with the application. 

Dr. Christopher -  And it's really cool because it's like the people that don't really interact with it ever really interact with it, but the people that interact with it at a moderate to high rate consistently use it at a high rate. Wow. And I think what was really great about that too, is it actually reduced in the acute phase, really, really severe symptoms or suicidal thoughts, really significantly improved, sort of the relationship, which sounds like a weird word to use in this context, but the relationship between the patient and the doctor, or in this case, which was the chatbot. It was also automatically able to flag if there were signs of crisis, human, physician, and then if there wasn't, though, what was also really interesting, this paper was so cool. I really do think we should share it with our community. 

Dr. Christopher -  But one of the other things they found is there's a scale that looks at the sort of like the collaborative effort. The name's escaping me. But the collaborative effort between the clinician and the patient and the same level of interaction was achieved in just over four weeks with this application between a chatbot and a human. Then, compared to other studies that looked at human to human interaction. Wow, that's really.

Dr. Marie -  That's incredible because you would think, and we'll definitely link to the paper in the show notes, you know, you would think that, oh, it's like it's a computer, like, it's not real. But clearly they've constructed it or, you know, finessed it to the point where it does feel real. And I'm just so happy to see such a massive reduction in symptoms and also a massive reduction in crisis symptoms for those who might be having thoughts of suicide. And it just makes me think, in my understanding and my training around suicide prevention and intervention, is that really making it clear to individuals that there is hope, there is help, you're not alone, your feelings are valid and there's solutions out there. It must be able to provide that. 

Dr. Marie -  Like, there must be enough of a connection established that person feels like, okay, I'm not alone, there is hope. And I've got this connection that really is like there whenever I need it. You know what I mean? Which isolation is a huge predictor of mental health challenges. So just having this there when you need it rather than, oh my gosh, I gotta wait till next Wednesday when I'm seeing my psychologist is just. It's tremendous. I love this use of technology. 

Dr. Christopher -  Well, and I think too, like, when you look at couples or colleagues and you're in a place like the workplace, how hard is it really? Like, we all say that we're supposed to be watching each other's backs, but everybody's dealing with their own stuff, right? And I think at the end of the day, we all try to look out for one another, but it can be really hard. And a lot of people mask their symptoms. And how nice is it that if you do need to step out and have a private moment, you don't need to check the phone anymore. You don't need to talk to your friend who you're not really sure if you should be talking to or not. You could really be sitting in a bathroom and talking to a chat bot. 

Dr. Christopher - That the hope is that at least acute phase reaction is going to be brought down to a level that it's tolerable until you can seek help. And I think that's where, like, these people are so afraid of, like, oh, we're chatting with chatbots. This is gonna ruin the patient to patient interaction or the patient to doctor interaction, and we're all becoming robots. But it's a tool. It's a tool to assist the critically ill no matter what that critical illness looks like. It's really amazing to see a potential utility in a disease that is honestly so difficult to manage and so difficult to, for lack of a better word, cure or get better. 

Dr. Marie -  Absolutely. It makes it accessible and that is the challenge with mental health care, is that it is not accessible to a lot of individuals or at least when they need it. And so I think it's great. I agree with you. It's one of many tools and the fact that it has oversight in that there are these keywords or key phrases or tone or whatever they've input into the algorithm that they can flag a physician to intervene. I think that's, you know, that's wonderful. 

Hey there. I want to take a quick minute to tell you about Hachiko because honestly, I used it myself during ICU shifts and it's made my life so much easier. Hachiko takes those long, complicated medical records and turns them into clear, concise summaries. 

Dr. Marie -  It even creates client friendly versions to improve client communication, which we all know can be a challenge on busy days. Plus you can chat with the records to find exactly what you need when you need it. Check it out today at revivingvetmed.com/hachiko. 

Dr. Christopher -  I was just gonna say, I think it reiterates like a point two about proper AI implementation, which I know were gonna talk about at some point, but it really holds true about that rigor on the back end that you always need. Like there's great companies and great products that come from a chat GPT wrapper. Just throwing something out into the world and watching what it does. But the fact that they train this specifically with psychologists in mind, with multiple trainees that would provide input that like you said, could understand that tone. We're training our own biases, our own understandings into the models that we develop. And so it is so important that the clinician is in the loop to create products like these moving forward. Totally, well

Dr. Marie -  Totally. Well that dovetails in perfectly to what I wanted to ask you about next, which is the challenges and ethical concerns when we're integrating AI into clinical settings. And I know when you developed Hachiko this was like a big thing that you really wanted to focus on. You were like, we don't want to risk having these hallucinations that ChatGPT can give us and other things. Talk to me about what the challenges and limitations are and what we need to be worried about from an ethical perspective. 

Dr. Christopher -  I think there's a lot that goes right now with the way that the profession is going. You know, as I mentioned right at the beginning, it's a super exciting time, but it's a double edged sword in terms of that excitement. I'm a big proponent of rapid adoption, but rapid, clear, transparent adoption. And I think that's one of the concerns I have right now. I saw a post by Mike Mark Massaro the other day that said 44 AI chatbots have been, or, sorry, AI scribes have been released into the veterinary space. 44 and I was just on speaking with a panel at the ACVIM and gave a presentation about sort of metrics and things like that. 

Dr. Christopher -  And I sort of asked the participants like, at what point are we as a profession going to require transparency and require metrics and require benchmarks that these systems plot against? Because the reality is you're basically 

throwing a dart at a dart board trying to hope it sticks in terms of that it's going to work for you. It's not always clear what they're doing with your data, it's not always clear what the recordings are doing. And we have to make sure that we're having our teams ask these questions transparently because the reality is it's you, your time and your data and you should own that. Whether you're a big corporation or whether you're a small independent practice, it doesn't matter. And safety is really, really important. 

Dr. Christopher - The other is we've talked about before this idea that there are AI tools or AI wrappers and there are AI models or products. And the difference between those two is that one is taking a model like ChatGPT's Open or OpenAI's model, or Claude or one of these other big models and quite literally building a front-facing application for you to play with and interact with that is unique to your setting. I think that's what we've actually seen roll out very quickly in the veterinary space most of the time. What's actually more important is, and we actually published on this back in December in Veterinary and Comparative Oncology, we actually took a human medical model that was trained on human medical text and tried to apply that to a veterinary context. It performed horribly. Wow. 

Dr. Christopher -  Realization for us, as you mentioned in our product to Hachiko, that a pipeline that is highly specific to the veterinary space is needed and that's how we built it. And that's because there are biases from the human space in the short forms they use, how they interact with patients, how they talk to their patients. The same way that the Entire Internet, which ChatGPT was trained on, has its own bias as well. Even talking about that chatbot paper that I mentioned or that we were talking about already for mental health, that when you actually look at the demographics, they did a great job of reporting all the demographics. It was majority white males that were in that study, or yes, were Asian as well as black individuals, but they were definitely the minority. And the question, what are those interactions? 

Dr. Christopher -  Like, what are the differences between those interactions or the topics that come up in those interactions? And what is the bias between having, I don't know, 80% white folks compared to or white males even compared to a white female and 100%? Every single system we build, we bring our own bias into a study that I really love to show every time I give a presentation. And it's from the University of Toronto as well as a group in the UK and they took radiographs from a big COVID 19 data set and they basically said, can we program an algorithm at baseline that can predict race? Just simply based of the radiograph? The metadata was wiped. The reality is they could do it. That wasn't even the part of the paper though, that was interesting. 

Dr. Christopher -  The part of the paper that was really interesting was they applied a whole bunch of filters to the point that they made it either a white box or a dark gray box, so it didn't even look like an X-ray anymore. And the machine learning algorithm that they had programmed was still able to predict race. So if we're introducing bias to that degree, racial bias, in that case, what does that look like when you start predicting outcomes? 

Dr. Marie - Wow. 

Dr. Christopher -  You start predicting treatment. And there's examples of this in the human space related to certain underprivileged groups or certain groups that don't have the same access to healthcare. They are automatically being pre-predicted as having a worse outcome. 

Dr. Marie -  Wow. 

Dr. Christopher -  Often receive care. So we have to be careful how we're mitigating this bias. And so again, this is kind of a run on sentence, but just the idea that if we're seeing that in the human space, I think we as a group, as a profession, 

really need to think about every single time something like this is deployed or a company is coming to you with their product, we need to ask the right questions. So, so important whether it's a mental health tool, whether it's a radiology tool, whether it's a summarizer or an AI scribe, all those things are extremely important to start asking as a clinic and as a team, because that's ultimately going to impact you, the clinician or the team member.

Dr. Marie -   100%. So wow, that's so much to think about. And I think definitely, these are things that people aren't thinking about. They just don't know. It's like you don't know what you don't know. So many of us are just so early learning about AI. Most individuals don't even understand the back end of it. They're like, wow, there's this tool and it's artificial intelligence and it's going to think like I do and it's going to write my medical records, but they're not thinking about any other layers behind it. So thank you so much for sharing that. Looking ahead, what emerging AI tools or platforms do you think hold the most promise either for clinical - I mean you've shared a little bit about what's on the forefront of clinical practice. What else do you think is coming out as far as clinical practice and mental health and wellbeing specifically? 

Dr. Christopher -  So I think to date, unfortunately we don't have a veterinary specific therapeutic chat bot. We don't have the same mental health support. Like, I mean it's still being researched on the human side and I think we actually need to the same way we talked about catering things to veterinary medical records. I'm hoping that there's going to be groups or a group that is going to continue to work on a bot that is unique to the veterinary space. Because I think the challenges we face, even though they're similar to human medicine, they're still different in other ways. And so I think it's actually an excellent, this podcast in particular the groups that you work with. 

Dr. Christopher -  I think it's a great jump off point that these are the types of things we should be working with some of the human medical professionals, psychologists and things to do something highly veterinary specific. So I think that'll come. I think the AI scribes are already out there and I really implore people to try them. And again, don't focus on the time you're saving, focus on how you feel after you've used it. And I think it's a really intriguing question to ask yourself because, you know, I spoke with my wife after a day of using one of the scribes and I was like, I was getting home at 3:30 instead of 6 and I was like, huh, this feels different, I feel different, I feel lighter. I'll take an extra case, I don't need to take an extra case, I can go home. 

Dr. Christopher -  It's really, really interesting how you feel different, but I think the future actually looks very bright. I'm really excited for the next chapters in veterinary AI. As long as we hold people accountable. And I reiterate that point only because I really want us to see. And one of the things our company is working on at the time of this podcast, at least our recording, is we're actually developing clinical benchmarks. We've run some independent benchmarks. And I think the world/community will be shocked at how some of these platforms are performing in comparison to those that actually take the time to make sure the model's deployed properly. And we'll publish that very shortly. But the future is going to be really interesting because I think we're going to see from intake to discharge, you will have an AI assistant that takes care of all of it. 

Dr. Christopher -  I think the utility of medical record systems EMRs are going to go away. And I think that you will be able to, from your recording to your discharge, to talking to the owner on the phone about anything related to the diagnostics that you ran or anything that you've run will just be completely automated. And I think that's going to be a really beautiful part of the profession where it's going to get right back to what we decided to do, which was help pets and their people, and hopefully that reinvigorates people to stay in the profession. 

Dr. Marie -  I love that. Oh, I love so much of what you said. And I can relate to that. And yes, like, the thing that I love so much when I'm able to use these AI tools in practice is that I can just set it and forget it without lack of a better phrase. And then I can really be present for the owner. You know, I can really connect with the client, I can have my hands on the patient. I can be talking out loud, really, watching the, reading the owner's body language, you know, listening for their cues, et cetera, and just be fully present without thinking, oh, my God, I got to write this down. I got to type on my laptop. I'm half listening, half looking. It's very disconnected. So for me, the connection piece is important. 

Dr. Marie -  And I think you hit the nail on the head. It's that alleviation of the mental labor or the mental burden of, oh my gosh, I've seen 10 cases today. I haven't written any histories. I have to go back and remember what the broken nail at 8 o' clock this morning told me, and now it's 5 o'clock, and that's really stressful. So not only is there this burden of, oh, my gosh, I got three more hours of records to write, but there's also the psychological distress of how am I going to remember all of this? Like, I don't know that my records are going to be accurate. I don't even remember what I did on my physical exam, like what the abnormalities were. 

Dr. Marie -  So, yeah, that's a huge alleviation to your mental wellness and your stress that you might otherwise feel, regardless of the time savings that you may or may not have. 

Dr. Christopher -  So a hundred percent. And I. There's a study from Microsoft in the US and with human medicine, but they said for every 15 minutes of patient interaction, 30 minutes of documentation is added to your workday. Wow. I am not surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if it's more in the veterinary space with how well we try to. I mean, vets are great people. We all, and I don't mean just vets, I mean veterinary teams. We all document highly excessively because I think we're all type A and anxious that we want to do that for good reason. But at the end of the day, just think about what that means for your day and think about the fact that, I mean me as an oncologist, I. 

Dr. Christopher -  Part of the reason we developed Hachiko, I was prepping at 8pm the night before to prep for cases the following day to make sure I was organized because otherwise my day didn't go smoothly. And it wasn't just the fact that I had to type records. It's the fact that I have to think about this and I have to do this and then I'm not getting my time off. And then if I don't do that, my day is going to be brutal the next day. And it's just, it's a different way of thinking and it's really amazing. I think there are going to be studies or we should do a few studies where we're actually looking at the clinical and mental health wellbeing impact of these tools in the space. 

Dr. Marie -  A hundred percent. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I can't wait. And I definitely am going to be putting a bug in some company's ears to make sure that we can try to make that happen. I can imagine that there's people listening to our conversation thinking they're just anxiety is ramping up, you know, speaking of mental health challenges, because they're scared of AI, they're scared of what the future holds. They're, maybe they're scared even about confidentiality and just having a tool that feels so out of control, especially to those from our generation that maybe watched Terminator back in the day and have these like horrible visions of like what robots of the future might do. What would you say to those individuals who are hesitant about adopting AI or using AI even on a personal level? What things should they be aware of and. 

Dr. Marie -  Yeah, what are your thoughts? 

Dr. Christopher -  I think I would say stop worrying depending on the tool you're using, which sounds so silly. You know, the reality is like even ChatGPT, it really, the rudimentary algorithms that were developed like 3.0 and before 4.0, which is the more recent version, they were literally predicting words in the next sentence. So it's basically statistics, advanced statistics. And that's all it is. Even though it seems crazier than it is, there's a lot more different advanced modeling that's happening now that you extract words out of a sentence and it's trying to relate that into a database. Dog and cat would be associated together versus alligator over on this corner. But again, this is advanced statistics is all machine learning is. We just have the computational power that when you chat with a chatbot, it outputs in a few milliseconds rather than 20 days later. 

Dr. Christopher -  Because, you know, our machines used to be so slow. That's all this is. However, I think what we need to see is teams advocating for responsible and ethical AI. Just like anything in life, in the wrong hands, it's going to go poorly. And I think we have to be really careful about what we're allowing into the profession, what we're allowing folks to do, folks to charge us for, without being transparent. Because ultimately again, all of the responsibility comes back to us. The European Union just passed a legislation that says if you run an AI tool that predicts patient outcome and the patient outcome ends up being non relatable, the AI company is actually on the hook in association with the doctor. That is not the case in Canada or the U.S. you as the clinician or team member are still fully on the hook. 

Dr. Christopher -  So think of it like any other diagnostic test. Ask the right questions. Ask the questions that make you feel confident in the tool that you're using and the things that you're recommending. And honestly, be transparent with your clients. Hey, I'm having a rough time with records, so I'm going to use an AI scribe while we're talking. I'm going to use a summarizer to summarize these records. Hope you're okay with that. There could be some mistakes here and there, but this is really to help me get home on time and I'm going to do my best to make sure it's as accurate as possible. Are you okay with that? That's a second conversation that changes your workflow and the client's perception of what you're trying to do. You know that as you. And I said, I want to spend more time with you.  So I'm going to have these things running in the background.

Dr. Marie -   And that's how I've always pitched it to my clients. You know, I'm going to have this running in the background that's going to allow me to really concentrate on what you're saying and concentrate on my exam and not have to think about that. And it is going to make it more efficient for me to get the records done and get the notes ready for you. And to date, knock on wood, I've never had a client resist that. Everybody is, you know, they want it to be efficient. They want you to be present and connected, and they just want everyone's life to be easier. So I think that's great advice. Well, this has been incredible. I feel like I could ask you so many more questions and I'm sure that we'll have a conversation again at some point. But this is just.

Dr. Marie -   This is awesome information and I think it's going to be so helpful for all veterinary team members and on the clinical side of things and the future that holds, but also the mental health side, which is, of course, such a passion for us. I'm going to ask the same question that I ask all of our guests before we finish up. What does the phrase reviving veterinary medicine mean to you, Chris? 

Dr. Christopher -  I think for me it's about moving away from us always being in survival mode and really re-excelling. The reason we got to it in the first place, which was to take care of animals, but honestly do really cool stuff every day, whether that's innovation, whether that's just being a good confidant to that client, or just realizing that what we do actually has a lot of meaning. And I think sometimes we forget that because we get bogged up in so many other things. So I hope that the tools and the things that we talked about today won't scare people. I think it's going to give the tools to make you fall in love with Vet Med again. 

Dr. Marie -  Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Beautifully said. What a great place to end. Thank you so much for your time today, Chris. It's been wonderful to chat with you. 

Dr. Christopher -  Thanks so much for having me. Love everything that you're doing. 

Dr. Marie -  So that's it for this episode of Reviving Vet Med. I hope Chris' insights helped shed light on how AI can be a powerful ally for vet professionals, not just in advancing clinical care, but also in supporting our wellbeing. Embracing technology thoughtfully can open new doors while preserving the empathy and connection that are at the core of what we do. If you found this conversation valuable, please share it with colleagues who might be curious or cautious about AI's role in Vet Med. Don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss upcoming episodes and check the show notes for links to connect with Chris or view some of the resources that we shared. You can also follow us at Reviving Vet Med on Social Media for ongoing wellbeing tips and support.

Dr. Marie -   For questions, topic ideas or sponsorship inquiries, please reach out anytime at podcast@revivingvetmed.com thank you so much to Dr. Christopher Pinard for joining us on today's episode. And thank you to Podcast Prime Solutions for producing this episode. Finally, thank you for listening all the way to the end. Until next time, take care of yourself. Bye for now.