Owning the Default Option

Default options are powerful, because 60% of people perceive them as an implied recommendation. In software that translates to 66-95% of people never opening the settings menu.

But who is people? Part of being a professional is about staying on top of new developments and improving your craft. In medicine this means knowing about and adopting the best tools and methods available for diagnosis and treatment. It improves the quality of your work and it signals your (superior) position in the community.

Yet, in a hospital setting, many of those changes are decided centrally by the management of the hospital; it’s a committee decision. The fact that so many individual clinicians are using AI tools for everything - certified or not - speaks more about their professional development than about the stickiness of any individual tool. As long as there is something new, professionals are inclined to explore it.

In the clinic, the tool that will become the next new default won’t be the tool that individuals benefit from. It will be the tool that the hospital organisation benefits from. And that’s a very different measuring stick.