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Speaker brings AI expertise to FUTURE
July 10, 2025, David Mitchell — Karim Hanna, MD, FAAFP, FAMIA, has been a physician for more than a decade and an educator for nearly as long. But if you recognize his name, it’s not necessarily from his roles as chief of the Department of Family Medicine at Tampa General Hospital (TGH), program director for that hospital’s family medicine residency or associate professor of family medicine at the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine.
It's more likely you might have seen Hanna’s name in a journal, heard him speak at a medical conference or found his Substack, which is devoted to artificial intelligence and its role in medical education.
Throughout the past three years, Hanna has been an author or co-author on more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles related to artificial intelligence. He’s given a similar number of presentations on the topic during that time, and his Substack has garnered more than 50,000 page views in less than two years.
“This is not my day job, which is caring for patients, teaching our students and building for our residents, but it has been a really fun side piece that has helped us put our program on the map,” said Hanna, who has been the program director of the University of South Florida’s Tampa General Hospital Family Medicine Residency since its inception in 2022. “This has been a wonderful ride for me as a mid-career academic physician. It has been exciting to meet the people in this space and to be invited to so many places.”
Hanna’s next stop is FUTURE (formerly the National Conference of Family Medicine Residents and Medical Students). During the July 31-August 2 event in Kansas City, Missouri, he’ll present a workshop on the role artificial intelligence could play in the future of family medicine.
“My hope is that students and residents are able to glean from that conversation some basics of what generative AI is and how it’s impacting clinical care, and some tools they can actively leverage as caregivers,” he said. “I plan to teach a bit of didactics and also show some live demonstrations of what these large language models can do in practice.”
South Florida’s medical students are already using AI during their family medicine clerkships. Hanna also runs an AI research group in which medical students collaborate with USF’s Computer Science and School of Information to address research questions.
In July, TGH residents will gain access to an ambient scribe and clinical decision-support tools.
“A lot of residencies across the country have leveraged this sort of tool, which hopefully alleviates the labor of writing notes, or at least assists them in completing their notes and their tasks more efficiently,” Hanna said.
Although the tools can help, Hanna acknowledged that institutions need to set guardrails for when it’s appropriate for learners to use such tools and for which tasks.
“We need to have these conversations because we don’t want to become over-reliant on technology, to the point we are losing important clinical skills like taking a history,” he said. “We also want to avoid ‘note bloat,’ where our notes are filled with a bunch of words that aren’t clinically significant.”
Hanna said each GME program at his institution will be responsible for setting its own limits on how the technology is used.
“As a community, we need to come back and revisit this conversation in six months,” he said, “because the technology changes constantly. We’re also going to learn a lot because this is the first time we’re rolling this out on such a large scale. Naturally, you’re going to have people on either extreme of ‘This is the best thing ever’ and ‘I don’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.’”
Hanna is board certified in clinical informatics as well as in family medicine. He said attending an American Medical Informatics Association conference in 2018 helped him find his passion.
“I think on the Venn diagram, the overlap of health and technology is really where I like to live and where I like to function,” he said.
It’s not surprising that the son of teachers found his way to a STEM field. Hanna said his father, his middle school math teacher, remains “the best teacher I've ever had.”
“I’ve always had an inclination toward teaching, learning and growth,” he said. “The academic space has been a wonderful journey for me, as I’m continuing to learn all the time and adding new skills, clinically as well as in teaching and research. Academic family medicine is an adventure. The variety in my days makes it stimulating, and I’ve been intentional to maintain a broad spectrum clinically as well.”