The Practice Brief: AI Capacity, Emerging Oral Therapies, and New Directions in Skin Cancer Care

Help your practice thrive—one week at a time.

Early October updates highlight AI-driven practice capacity, emerging oral psoriasis therapies, nonsurgical skin cancer strategies, and long-term AD control.

Welcome to The Practice Brief, your weekly roundup of the news, trends, and ideas shaping the future of dermatology. Each edition highlights the biggest developments in practice management, reimbursement, policy, AI, business, and professional growth, while connecting them to existing Dermatology Times and NP/PA Connect coverage. The goal isn't just to keep you informed—it's to help you discover what's next, identify opportunities, and keep your practice performing at its best.

Autonomous AI Could Help Create More Room on Dermatology Schedules

Artificial intelligence in dermatology is moving beyond hypothetical use cases.

Real-world data presented at the 2026 European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV) Congress suggested that autonomous AI-supported assessment could create capacity for more than 8,500 additional dermatology appointments while maintaining high sensitivity for invasive skin cancers.

The findings point toward one potential answer to a persistent challenge in dermatology: demand for specialist care continues to exceed available capacity in many settings.

Rather than simply asking whether AI can recognize suspicious lesions, practices may increasingly need to consider where these tools could fit within existing pathways. Appropriate use could potentially support triage, prioritize patients requiring specialist evaluation, and allow clinicians to devote more time to complex disease.

At the same time, implementation raises practical questions surrounding oversight, patient communication, workflow integration, and what happens when automated assessments are uncertain or conflict with clinical judgment.

▶ Why it matters: The most meaningful impact of AI may not be replacing a clinical task but redistributing limited clinical time. Practices evaluating these tools should focus on where they add capacity without compromising appropriate clinician oversight.

Oral Psoriasis Treatment Is Becoming a More Competitive Conversation

As the psoriasis treatment landscape expands, clinicians may have more to discuss with patients who prefer oral therapy.

Phase 3 LATITUDE Atlas data presented at EADV showed greater skin clearance with investigational zasocitinib compared with deucravacitinib in patients with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis.

The head-to-head findings are particularly relevant because they move the conversation beyond whether an oral therapy works and toward how different oral options may compare.

For practices, an expanding treatment landscape means patient counseling will need to account for more than headline efficacy numbers. Disease severity, special-site involvement, previous treatment experience, safety considerations, monitoring requirements, convenience, and individual treatment goals can all shape the decision.

As therapies achieve increasingly high levels of clearance, expectations may evolve as well. Patients who once viewed partial improvement as treatment success may increasingly ask about the possibility of clear or almost clear skin.

▶ Why it matters: More options can improve individualized care, but they also make treatment discussions more complex. Clinicians should be prepared to translate comparative trial results into realistic, patient-specific conversations rather than relying on efficacy percentages alone.

Could High-Risk BCC Gain Another Nonsurgical Strategy?

Surgery remains central to the treatment of basal cell carcinoma (BCC), but emerging research continues to explore alternatives for selected patients.

Phase 2b SPOTLIGHT-204 data presented at EADV evaluated intralesional BO-112 in patients with resectable, high-risk BCC of the head and neck. More than half of treated patients achieved complete clinical and pathological responses.

BO-112 is designed to activate innate and adaptive antitumor immune responses through direct injection into the tumor. Although additional research will be necessary to determine where the approach could ultimately fit into care, the findings illustrate continued interest in treatments capable of reducing or potentially avoiding surgery in selected cases.

For clinicians, that evolving landscape could eventually broaden discussions with patients for whom surgery is challenging because of tumor location, cosmetic considerations, comorbidities, or individual preferences.

It also reinforces the importance of multidisciplinary decision-making. Novel local therapies are unlikely to eliminate the need for surgical expertise, pathology, surveillance, and careful patient selection.

▶ Why it matters: A nonsurgical response does not automatically make a treatment the right choice for every BCC. As local therapies develop, clinicians will need to help patients understand the tradeoffs among clearance, recurrence risk, cosmetic outcomes, treatment burden, and long-term follow-up.

Long-Term AD Data Can Change the Patient Conversation

For patients beginning a new atopic dermatitis (AD) treatment, one of the most important questions is often simple: Will it keep working?

Three-year findings from the ARCADIA long-term extension study provided additional data on sustained nemolizumab responses. At week 152, high proportions of patients maintained improvements in skin clearance, itch, sleep disturbance, and dermatology-related quality of life, with no new safety signals identified over the extended treatment period.

Those outcomes are useful beyond the clinical trial setting because they reflect several priorities patients frequently bring into the examination room.

Skin clearance matters, but so do sleeping through the night, controlling persistent itch, participating in everyday activities, and knowing whether improvement is likely to persist.

As the number of targeted AD therapies grows, long-term data may increasingly help distinguish treatment options and support shared decision-making.

▶ Why it matters: Clinicians can make trial data more meaningful by connecting traditional efficacy measures with outcomes patients actually experience. Long-term counseling should address not only whether a therapy improves disease but whether that control is durable and translates into better daily life.

The Bigger Picture: Innovation Has to Work in the Real World

The first days of October brought no shortage of new dermatology data.

But for practices, the most important question is what happens after those data leave the congress hall.

AI may help create additional clinical capacity, but practices need appropriate workflows and oversight. More effective oral therapies may expand psoriasis treatment choices, but clinicians still need to determine which option fits an individual patient. New approaches to BCC could broaden nonsurgical possibilities, while long-term AD findings can help patients understand what sustained disease control may actually look like.

The common thread is translation.

As dermatology becomes more technologically advanced and therapeutically crowded, clinicians will increasingly need to turn complex evidence into practical decisions patients can understand and practices can realistically implement.

Patient Counseling Has to Keep Up With Social Media

The need for individualized communication became particularly relevant this month as clinicians confronted another social media-driven skin trend: “tan maxing.”

In an interview with Dermatology Times, Vishal Patel, MD, FAAD, FACMS, discussed how clinicians can talk with patients about tanning without simply telling them to avoid the sun entirely.

Rather than beginning with prohibition, Patel encouraged clinicians to understand what a patient hopes to achieve and explain how UV exposure contributes to DNA damage, cumulative photodamage, premature skin aging, and skin cancer risk.

That approach can create opportunities to discuss safer alternatives while preserving a productive clinician-patient conversation.

▶ Why it matters: Health trends can spread across social media much faster than traditional patient education. Clinicians need to understand what patients are seeing online and be prepared to address those behaviors without immediately losing their attention or trust.

References

1. Heaning S. Autonomous AI could create capacity for more than 8,500 additional dermatology appointments. Dermatology Times. Published October 1, 2026.
2. Heaning S. Zasocitinib demonstrates superior skin clearance vs deucravacitinib in phase 3 psoriasis trial. Dermatology Times. Published October 2, 2026.
3. Heaning S. Intralesional BO-112 shows promise as nonsurgical approach for high-risk BCC. Dermatology Times. Published October 1, 2026.
4. Heaning S. Q&A: Three-year nemolizumab data highlight sustained control of atopic dermatitis. Dermatology Times. Published October 2, 2026.