Todd Ponsky, MD

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Todd Ponsky, MD Chief Innovation Officer
Cincinnati Childrens Hospital
Professor of Surgery: Pediatric General and Thoracic Surgery
Professor, University of Cincinnati

18/11/2025

I’ve been experimenting with Claude Skills, Custom GPTs, and ChatGPT Projects, and wow—each one works differently.
Custom GPTs are great for repeatable tasks, Projects keep all your past outputs organized, and Claude Skills act more like background knowledge the model pulls in when needed.
I still can’t say which is “best,” but I’m using both because they each shine in different situations.

18/11/2025

Did you know your Apple HomePod has a safety feature that could actually save your life?
It listens for fire alarms and carbon monoxide detectors, and if something goes wrong, it sends an alert straight to your phone.
Such a simple feature, but incredibly powerful. 🚨

14/11/2025

I finally found a perfect example of when to use Claude vs. ChatGPT. I dictated a long narrative about my company and asked ChatGPT to summarize it. It followed instructions perfectly and produced a clean story. Claude, on the other hand, pushed back, literally! It told me what I couldn’t claim, what didn’t make sense, and how to reframe things. It felt less like a tool and more like a smart colleague.

ChatGPT = executes.
Claude = challenges.
Both are amazing in different ways.

12/11/2025

“Wouldn’t it be cool if…” is how great ideas start — but too often, that’s where they end.
Next time you say it, take 10 minutes and look into what it would take to actually do it.
Don’t wait for someone else to make it happen.

12/11/2025

“Don’t let the arrow hit you twice.” 🏹

I love this quote because it perfectly describes what anxiety feels like. The first arrow is what happens — the bad news, the mistake, the stressful situation. The second arrow is what we do to ourselves afterward — the worrying, replaying, and beating ourselves up.

We can’t always control the first arrow, but we can stop firing the second. Breathe. Let it pass. 💭💫

10/11/2025

Okay, I admit it — I overcomplicated this one 😅 I made a shortcut to paste ChatGPT responses into emails without that odd font… then learned there’s a built-in fix: just click Paste → Match Style! Sometimes the smartest trick is the simplest one.

07/11/2025

You’ve probably copied something from ChatGPT into an email before and noticed the weird font, right? 😅
It’s an easy giveaway that it came from AI.

Here’s a shortcut I made that automatically fixes it — it pastes into Notepad first, clears the formatting, then pastes perfectly into your email.
No more weird fonts or “AI” look.

I think The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday is the book that’s had the greatest impact on me. I’ve read (and listene...
06/11/2025

I think The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday is the book that’s had the greatest impact on me. I’ve read (and listened to) it multiple times over the years.

It taught me about Stoicism — and that we can’t control what happens, only how we respond. So why stress about the outcome?

Whenever something goes wrong, I remind myself that almost every “bad” thing in my life has eventually led to something really good. It doesn’t make the hard moments easier, but it helps me trust the process.

💭 Have you ever had something bad turn out to be a blessing in disguise?

04/11/2025

Every week, we present complications in our M&M conference — a tough but important tradition in medicine.

But we decided to change the tone. Instead of ending with “here’s what went wrong,” we added a new question:
💡 “What innovation could’ve solved this?”

We even renamed it: MM&I — Morbidity, Mortality, and Innovation.

In just 6 months, that mindset shift has led to six provisional patents.

Sometimes innovation doesn’t start with a big idea — it starts with a tough conversation.

03/11/2025

Get my free Prompt Library: toddponsky.substack.com

I wanted to show how academic medical centers are moving toward media-driven education — so I let help me tell the story 🎬

I used Gemini to create images of a boring medical lecture (and it nailed it 😅), then used VO3 to turn that into a video. After that, I made a second video showing how summary videos make learning more engaging.

It’s a fun example of how AI image + video generation can make PowerPoint slides way more visual and impactful.

The future of education is storytelling — powered by AI.

31/10/2025

I’m a surgeon with zero tech background, but I’ve been curious about all these no-code app builders popping up. So I decided to try one myself — an app called Lovable.

It’s honestly one of the easiest no-code tools I’ve used so far. You can just describe what you want, and it builds your app or website step by step. What makes it special is the built-in backend database, which is great if you’re uploading or managing content.

To test it out, I helped a friend’s daughter (she’s an artist 🎨) create a small website to show and sell her art. I literally just typed what I wanted — “a gallery where people can browse and buy art” — and then went back and forth with the AI until it looked right.

It worked beautifully, but here’s the catch: it can get pricey over time. So while I don’t use it much anymore, I still think it’s a fantastic place to start if you’re learning no-code app building.

💡 Takeaway: Even if you’ve never written a line of code, tools like Lovable make it possible to bring your ideas to life.

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