December 3, 2025
McKnight's Long-Term Care News
I was very honored to be invited to make a short presentation on the topic of “AI by Role” at the recent 2025 McKnight’s Tech Awards + Summit virtual event. The co-presenters and I each shared AI’s impact on acute and long-term care from our unique perspectives — for nurses, administrators, therapists and medical directors.
When reviewing the anecdotes and data that each of us shared, it’s clear the tremendous impact that AI tools have on the most routine and time-consuming portions of our jobs, and the potential these technologies can have to optimize care, reduce mistakes, and minimize the administrative load.
As with so many groundbreaking technological innovations, however, we can also see the potential for shortcuts, mistakes and eliminating the human touch from our work with patients — all important reminders as we begin to integrate these powerful tools into our workday.
AI in the medical director role
Diagnostic tool
Using AI in my day-to-day work with patients takes a few forms. The most important among them is for diagnosis and treatment. When I want to know the newest treatment guidelines on a specific condition — especially one that I don’t frequently encounter in my clinical practice — I count on AI tools such as Open Evidence to find me the latest guidance backed up by evidence.
By entering that information into other AI tools, I can then pull up a treatment protocol. What once took hours of review now takes only minutes — with a result that is often better and backed by the latest clinical evidence.
In some difficult or complex cases, where the test results from our patients are unexplained and confusing — such as when I recently encountered some unusual electrolyte abnormalities with a patient — AI tools can sometimes lead to a differential diagnosis that I can pursue further using my own clinical expertise.
To me, this is a powerful application that offers the best of both worlds: incredible computing power and access to millions of data points in complex situations, combined with the knowledge and experience of a well-trained physician.
QAPI: Identifying deviations from standards of care
In my role as Certified Medical Director and CMO, I need to know that we are meeting the highest standards of patient care and adhering to the latest guidelines and recommendations. Using AI tools, a quick database query can reveal higher-than-normal deviations from standard treatments in a facility or with a specific practitioner, which highlights opportunities for additional training.
Ambient AI captures, information retrieval delivers — you connect
AI is already making the operational side of a physician’s work less burdensome. We know that EHRs and other record-keeping requirements are adding to burnout and reducing our time face-to-face with our patients.
New tools allow for intelligent querying of records for rapid retrieval of critical patient data, saving hours each week, while ambient AI tools can generate chart notes in real time and rapidly sort large volumes of information for faster decision-making.
For example, if I am working with a diabetic patient, I can quickly search through years of patient records to find their last nephrology consult, or the dates of their last microalbumin screening or retinal exam, and determine the next steps almost immediately.
And the future of ambient AI provides even more possibilities, such as listening in (with patient approval) to an interaction and giving the clinician real-time feedback on the patient’s mood, how the clinician communicated (Was I rude? Was I difficult to understand?), or other important clues to improve the human side of patient care.
AI: A tool, not a substitute
This great potential still comes with a caveat: AI is just a robot. It can’t replace a skilled, experienced, well-trained medical professional who understands their patients. AI makes mistakes. It misinterprets data. Sometimes, it even hallucinates. It’s critical to ensure that clinicians employ AI responsibly as a tool, interpreting it through the lens of their training and experience treating patients and providing care.
I welcome more opportunities like these for colleagues across the PALTC space to explore and debate these new tools to streamline our work. You can watch a replay of the entire “AI by role: How technology supports care teams” session by simply registering and logging in to the McKnight’s Tech Awards + Summit 2025 website.
Sabine von Preyss-Friedman, MD, FACP, CMD, is the president of the Post-Acute and LTC Medical Association (PALTmed) and the chief medical officer for Caldera Care.