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POMA wants The Journal of the Pennsylvania Osteopathic Medical Association to be a safe space for all DOs to have a voice and be heard. Opportunities to contribute in all content areas are open to all osteopathic medical students, residents and physicians. Share your thoughts, ideas and submissions via email to [email protected].
*Views expressed in The Journal of the Pennsylvania Osteopathic Medical Association are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editorial board, The JPOMA, or POMA unless specified.
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This Is My Vision of What a Clinical AI Co-Pilot Should Do for the Practicing Clinician at the Point of Encounter
October 2026 | Vol. 70, No. 3
By Michael Eyer, DO, ACOFP, ACEP
USAF Flight Surgeon; Aerospace Medical Association (AsMA); AsHFA (Aerospace Medicine)
Abstract
Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly positioned as clinical decision-support tools, yet most remain limited to static reference functions. This article presents a practical vision of the seven essential capabilities required for an AI system to function as a trusted specialist sitting beside the clinician during the patient encounter, applicable across the full lifespan. These capabilities—universal knowledge access, patient-specific application, full longitudinal chart synthesis, ranked differential generation, suggested evaluation pathways, treatment plan formulation, and on-demand patient education—enable the AI to execute the learnable, intra-category work of medicine while preserving the clinician’s unique capacity to detect category failure. Designed with medical ethics, professional society guidelines, FDA expectations for transparency, and HIPAA requirements at the core, the framework emphasizes continuous human oversight and the explicit preservation of clinical judgment. The result is reduced cognitive load, restored clinician–patient rapport, and a system architecture that keeps signals of misfit visible rather than suppressed.
Keywords: clinical artificial intelligence; decision support systems; cognitive load; differential diagnosis; human–AI collaboration; category failure; patient education; point-of-care.
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The Patient is Not Divided: Why Psychiatry Taught Me About Clinical Integration
October 2026 | Vol. 70, No. 3
By Maimoona Mahek, OMS-III, LECOM
“Is this medical or psychiatric?”
I heard this question posed in various ways during the course of my clinical training. Prior to my psychiatry rotation, I rarely questioned this premise.
Medical training is all about categorization. Medical school teaches us cardiology, neurology, surgery, internal medicine, and psychiatry separately because only through the process of breaking down a massive amount of information is it possible to teach it. This structure is necessary. Clinical training, however, presents a very different challenge: learning how to integrate those separate disciplines in a single patient.
Patients, however, do not arrive divided along the same lines.
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Enhancing Patient Adherence in the All-Too-Brief Office Visit
June 2026 | Vol. 70, No. 2
By M. Robin DiMatteo, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Riverside
Visits to follow up on medication and chronic disease management can be as short as
12 to 15 minutes. What are the most effective strategies that you and your healthcare team can employ to help your patients when you are “ruled by the clock”?
We like to think of the process of medical care as a fairly linear event in which the doctor gives an order and the patient quietly obeys. But what really happens is usually “messier” than that. Most clinicians would probably agree that the clinician-patient encounter can be quite complex, and what the patient does after it can be influenced by a host of unexpected factors.
Decades before they had mountains of data supporting their intuition, many clinicians felt that the hardest part of practicing medicine often wasn't the diagnosis but rather it was the follow-through. It is said that human behavior is the “wildcard” in medical care delivery, and patient nonadherence is a huge and often unmet challenge.
On average, one in four patients are "nonadherent" to their physicians’ advice; in the context of some disease conditions, the nonadherence rate is considerably higher. For every four people who walk into a doctor’s office seeking help, one of them will walk out and leave that help behind. Often this happens before the process of care even starts; fifteen percent of prescriptions are never filled. In many chronic conditions, close to 50% of patients have stopped adhering within six months of embarking on their treatment regimens.
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