You're listening to the PT Pinecast,
where smart people in healthcare come to
make noise.
Here's your host, Jimmy McKay.
All right, as always,
want to say thanks to Empower EMR.
If your clinic is stuck in an EMR
that slows you down,
you do realize that that's not,
that's not...
Death and tax is the only thing you've
really got to count on.
You can leave your EMR.
You can do it.
You're allowed.
I checked.
Empower gives you speed,
clean workflows and features PTs actually
asked for.
It's almost as if they're in all the
Facebook groups listening to your
employees anonymously because now you can
post on Facebook anonymously,
complain about the stuff at their job.
Here's the thing.
You're allowed to fix that.
Because they're asking for things like
better notes.
Yeah, if you've ever treated a patient,
you're pissed off about that.
You want better notes,
faster documentation, smooth operations,
all wrapped in customer support that
doesn't ghost you.
Because here's the thing,
when something goes wrong, and it will,
you just want someone to be able to
fix it.
Even if you don't fix it quick,
I just want to know you are working
on it.
And that's what happens there.
So upgrade your clinic's brain.
This is the thing you're probably playing
with more than your phone if you're
working with Empower EMR.
Find them online.
They're walking through it nice and slow
on what the future could look like at
empoweremr.com.
One more time for the people in the
back, empoweremr.com.
It's weird doing the live read while
you're sitting here, Sharif.
Yeah, I'm right here.
It's great to hear it though.
I'm like, yeah, let's do it.
Hearing it live is fun.
Three part series.
We had you on before.
So if you are listening to this,
this is like Voltron.
This is the second in three.
All right.
So don't skip the first part.
Previously, we talked about,
I think I titled the episode like the
silent tax episode.
on PT clinics.
I wanted you to understand, you,
the person listening,
who's thinking of launching, launched,
trying to grow, whatever.
Your EMR could be costing you,
and I'm not talking about what you have
to pay to use it.
It could be paying annoyance tax on your
clinicians.
That's not fair.
It could be losing you time.
And we know time equals money.
You could be losing staff because of this
decision or a non-decision.
So that's part one.
This is part two of three.
And this one I wanted to focus on
the big hairy...
I won't even call it scary.
I'll call it the big hairy question mark.
Here it is.
I'm sure you've never heard this phrase,
right?
AI and physical therapy.
It's everywhere.
Go to LinkedIn.
You're going to trip over it everywhere.
But I wanted to come to you because...
You've been doing this for twenty one
years.
You've seen things come and go.
I think in your last episode was a
great thing.
You started when EMRs were a covered
wagon.
You started when it was Oregon Trail.
That was that was advanced.
Oregon Trail was advanced.
So you've seen things come and go.
Things are cyclical.
You can see the patterns.
You can see the signal in the noise.
So today, what's real?
What's hype?
What will actually change in your practice
in the next three months, three years?
Knowing that you don't have a crystal
ball,
but you do have a memory and you've
seen the only way to predict or best
try to predict the future is to understand
the path.
So when PT owners, first of all,
When they hear AI in healthcare,
what do you see them misunderstanding the
most right now when you're doing deep
dives with current or potential clinics
coming on board with Empower?
Yeah, no, it's good to be back.
I would have to say,
I think the goal is to keep you
from dying from dysentery on the Oregon
Trail.
That was always like the thing, right?
It's like you've died from dysentery and
now it's like, so you've died from AI,
from hearing too much about AI.
You've been AI to death.
uh because you know you're not just
hearing about it on linkedin and pt but
like everything on the news is about ai
everything every product even products
that make no sense have ai in them
like you go to the grocery store and
popcorn has ai in it doesn't make any
sense how does this have ai in it
and what can it do for me but
it's just it's you there was a meme
i saw on on um
like a year ago and it was like
CEOs adding AI to their product.
And it was a guy making a sandwich
and he just was just pouring sauce all
over it.
The sauce with the,
and he just kept going and then he
put it in a styrofoam container and then
covered the styrofoam container in the
sauce and then did this three more times.
So it's overwhelming, I think.
And so what's the number one thing I
think to start, you know,
you ask some tough questions like what's
next in three months and three years.
I think the number one thing right now
is probably some of the claims are maybe
a little bit beyond the reality of the
actual technology itself.
I mean, AI is incredible, right?
It is.
You can go and you can talk to
it and ask it a question and it
can synthesize an answer.
It's really incredible.
And then obviously there are all these
other applications for it,
like self-driving and things that are even
pushing boundaries in one's mind.
But that's counterbalanced by the fact
that you may have even had your own
experience with this as a listener.
You signed up for something that said it
was AI-laden, you got it,
and it wasn't that great.
Maybe it was like an extra frill or
something like that,
or there was a bunch of it.
So I think there's a growing...
The number one thing to know is there's
a growing dichotomy between AI claims and
AI reality.
And I think that's especially true in PT
right now.
It's
It's another technological wild,
wild west where obviously everybody wants
to go for the gold rush and claim
their stake and say, okay,
we can do this.
We have AI.
And then there are some meaningful
implementations of it that are making real
changes, positive changes.
And there's others that are just a veneer.
And sometimes they're not even really AI,
you know, not to get technically detailed,
but sometimes they're just like a riff on
an older technology that kind of smells
like AI.
It's like using a, you know,
I can't believe it's not butter instead of
real butter.
So it's not what you think.
And, um,
Here's the problem, though,
is that these kind of faux things can
cost you real money and real time.
So that's where it becomes, you know,
it's not just fun and games.
It's real money.
It's real time.
It's real people.
It's real patients.
It's real systems.
So you do need to get increasingly more
judicious about some of this stuff and,
like,
what you believe and what you can hold
in your hands and what you can use.
what you actually think will make a
difference in your practice versus just
sounds really cool on a drive-by
advertising marketing.
Where is it legit?
You mentioned, hey,
it's pretty good at some things.
So where is it legit?
Where does the hype match the output?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, listen,
I think the two best things right now
that AI can do both broadly,
but also specifically in our sort of neck
of the woods is helping document and
summarize and write or helping write.
So that can come in a variety of
forms like documentation is obviously
number one in this world, but marketing,
job descriptions, like creating content.
The aisle was found,
and maybe others did too,
that starting a document was the hardest
part.
Remember when you'd open Word and you're
just staring at that blank thing,
and you know you're supposed to write
something, and you're like,
how do you even write?
Then once you get going,
it's not so bad.
So that's really where AI can help, right?
It's like, just give me a few inputs.
Like, I need to write Jimmy a letter.
I need to tell him he's great,
and I don't know where to start.
Can you write this?
And same with documentation.
I have a patient.
Here's a little bit about the
presentation.
Help me.
Or do an ambient record the thing and
have it started.
And then it's really good at summarizing
information.
So if you have a large volume of
data and you need to like,
just give me like ten things I can
read about.
And I have to laugh when it's like
now it's summarizing chats with your
friends.
That seems a little ridiculous.
Like just read your chats with your
friends.
That's five or six things.
But if you have like a chart of
notes for a patient and you kind of
want to distill that down into like a
little narrative about that patient is
really good at that kind of stuff.
It's not good at, you know,
at like solving, you know,
actual problems in some cases.
I mean, I'm,
I'm a patient at times as many of
us are with different things.
I don't really want, you know,
chat GPT to be my clinician.
Maybe it can help give some pointers and
some tips and things like that.
It's, it's not really good at like at,
like really offloading a hundred percent
of your practice too.
I think that's like the biggest claim.
Like, don't worry, AI will do it.
It's like, AI will do what?
And who's going to look over it and
make sure that it doesn't embarrass you or
do something stupid that doesn't make any
sense or hallucinate and just plain flatly
out be wrong,
which is absolutely possible.
You have to remember that AI is really
just pattern recognition on steroids.
So it's like it's learning what patterns
are.
It's the simple like one, three, five.
What's the next number?
And you're like, oh, that's easy.
It's seven.
That's what AI is,
but on a grand scale.
What I'm trying to get at here is,
you know,
anybody who says it's not changing the
world and it's not that important is
wrong.
Everybody, anybody who says, you know, by,
you know, June, you know,
your food will be delivered by an AI
robot and they'll be cleaning your house
and all that's also wrong.
And again,
PT practices really have to be tight with,
you know,
what they want to do and what they
want to spend on in order to be
successful.
Always and never,
as we were taught in test taking, hey,
beware of always and never.
Beware of everything or nothing.
It's probably somewhere in the middle.
And because it's a PT podcast, of course,
I'm going to say it depends.
What are the parts of PT that you
think should not be automated?
What would you put in the black box
and go, no, don't touch it.
I don't want this.
You should not automate this.
Or sorry,
I should not put AI in there.
Yeah, well,
I certainly think the clinical aspect
needs a lot of, you know,
thinking and time.
I mean, you know, again, as a patient,
as a human being, you know,
there is value to somebody who's gone
through extensive education, right,
to learn,
and they're actually putting their hands
on you and understanding what's happening
with you and that sort of thing.
And again, I think that can be augmented,
but that's something.
The second one I would give urge caution
with is,
try so i wouldn't say there's something
that at the moment i'm ready to say
can never be touched by ai but there
are some things that should be very end
or very cautious and another one is your
patient experience um i don't know if you
enjoy talking to ai phone things or ai
chat bots it's a mixed bag you know
sometimes it's like you're like when you i
would say though as again as a customer
of things like when i have a good
experience with one i'm kind of surprised
i'm like actually that's pretty good you
know like it actually did what i want
Most of the time, though,
I'm chatting with the damn thing because I
already know I have an exception and
that's why I need to talk to somebody.
And so what you want to be careful
with with your patient experience is over
automating it to death and realizing that
you're really upsetting your patients.
You know, these are your customers.
This is your money.
And, you know, what will they do?
Well, they could go to another practice.
They could fall off their plan of care
and kill off half your revenue stream from
that patient.
They can exercise their
kind of power.
So I see a lot out there about,
you know, the phones will be gone,
the front desk will be fully gone,
nobody cares, you know,
the AI bot will do everything and collect
the money and, you know, caution,
you know, radar goes up and just says,
there are absolutely opportunities to make
that stuff better and more streamlined and
get rid of the scut work.
There are some things that need, you know,
and you're in healthcare, you're not in,
you're not Amazon delivering widgets.
So you need to have some human
compassion, I think,
and empathy to mix in with that tech
stack.
And actually,
if you do a good job with it,
I think you can amplify some of those
good things rather than thinking about it
as a way to get rid of those
things or get rid of those costs.
You get to define the next terms for
the next question.
Small versus large clinics,
because you work with both, right?
You work with a range of who works
with.
So how do you think AI and automation
change the economics of small clinics and
versus medium or large like there are
different problems if you are doing less
than a million dollars a year versus
twenty million dollars a year and i know
people are like it's more complicated i go
yes you have you're either you're you're
on the up ramp you're just in different
parts of a life cycle so which means
economics or the things that are important
or hard are different for these practices
so how do you think ai and automation
actually change the economics of small
versus large over the next couple of years
Yeah, more money, more problems,
I think is the good old adage there
for sure.
You know, oddly enough,
I would say in a lot of ways
that the problems aren't that different
between smaller practices and larger,
just in the sense that
often they're confronting the same issues
it's the scale um obviously that matters
so like a small practice would say you
know cancels and no shows are a challenge
for us and a large practice might also
say cancels and no shows are a challenge
for us but the large practice needs to
solve for a thousand cancellations a month
out of you know ten thousand visits and
the little one needs to solve for fifty
out of you know out of a thousand
over the course of a month something like
that
And so how has it changed the economics?
I mean, for sure,
practice that is really effectively using
technology can definitely hit,
punch a little bit out of its weight
class.
It can sort of emulate a larger practice
with less resources.
So that's kind of interesting.
But the flip side to that is that
any size practice that's doing a poor
implementation or poor job of actually
using the tools could actually be spending
more money and possibly even be less
efficient just because they're not doing a
good job with the actual tools they have.
You can see evidence of that at times
where they're trying to stretch too much
and do too much,
and then the outcome is actually lower
output, more burnout,
like just everybody's frazzled,
and then it starts showing up.
in satisfaction, employee, patient,
in money, and those sorts of things.
So I do think there's some similarities.
I do think, you know,
any practice can sort of make itself,
bulk it up,
bulk itself up a little bit with the
right technology and with the right
utilization.
I don't think, you know,
Yeah, it's a very interesting question.
It just plays into some much larger themes
that are kind of floating around my head,
but I don't want to go too far
afield.
But more money is flowing into the PT
space,
exits and conglomeration is all a
conversation that, again,
being in the space for a long time
wasn't a reality a few years ago,
but certainly has entered in a large way
if you go to any large scale PT
events.
i don't know you could walk around with
your ai and it can count how many
times people say multiple what's the
multiple what are we getting for a
multiple that's like a super cool word and
it you know it's so it's it's uh
changed a lot and um so i think
that that's the bottom line is you can
punch higher than your class but only with
a good only with a positive quality
implementation of the tools
Right now, who benefits the most?
Who gets the most juice versus squeeze
from adopting automation early?
Is it struggling clinics, growing clinics,
high-performing ones?
Is it they all benefit differently?
But who is like, hey, listen,
automation can help this group the most at
what?
Yeah,
I guess my off-the-cuff answer is it's the
middle of the bell curve that can most
improve from this.
The struggling ones, unfortunately,
sometimes their struggles are not related
to technology.
It's a patient pipeline problem.
It's a payer problem.
out of whack balance between admin staff
and providers.
Like something is structurally going on is
often what I see.
And I really feel bad when I see
those clinics because they will often
start attributing it to other things.
They bring in a new system,
their problems are the same or worse,
and they don't understand why
And it's because there's whatever
structural issue they have.
You know,
we have one PT who works part time
in a PTA and we don't understand why
we're not making any hay.
I mean, I can tell you why.
There's no EMR you can buy that's going
to change your dynamic or your economics
on that.
The high-end clinics,
they're usually more dialed in,
not always,
sometimes they just have had awesome
organic growth and they're just the
benefactors of luck and they really
haven't dialed things in,
but many of them have dialed things in
and their benefit primarily would be
reduction or redirection of staff.
So reduction,
like literally they can offload things and
have less people or redirection,
we can offload tasks and have Jimmy work
on something more profitable or some
marketing effort we didn't previously
have.
And that can help them
improved by ten percent let's say but the
middle one the one that's like not failing
and not blowing it out of the water
uh really has a lot to gain by
saying like you know what like if if
we could see another five patients per
week if we could um attract you know
a little bit more if if we could
automate a few things and you know we
can keep our front desk but they want
to only work a half day on friday
and and we get to keep a trusted
employee but we kind of give a little
get a little
They have a lot to gain from implementing
AI, from implementing technology, again,
meaningfully and measurably,
because then they can go from being in
the middle.
They can avoid falling into that
struggling category,
or they can actually push into the lower
end of that sort of high performing
practice or beyond, you know,
over a period of time.
All right.
You've been around since it was.
Did I surprise you with that answer?
Or is that what you expected?
Okay.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I think people are always thinking like,
aha, the high-end clinics are always,
you know, the ones, the high performing,
are they going to crush it with
technology?
And, you know, they certainly are leading.
They are on the front end of the
adoption curve, but for different reasons,
I think at times.
Sure.
I mean, listen, like, look at it,
you know,
and it doesn't always work when you make
a parallel.
But if you got a boat that's sinking,
a boat that's doing all right,
and a boat that is, you know,
like one of those crew boats in the
Olympics,
you might improve that Olympic crew rowing
skull one percent.
And then that's the difference between
gold or not.
you're going to need a bilge pump and
a giant patch to get the one who's
already mid-sinking.
New paint job ain't going to fix it,
right?
But the middle, you might see the best...
roi the biggest change because like you're
not sinking we can we can work on
higher level problems we're not in as my
dad a firefighter would say what's the
worst thing to do in a panic situation
and the answer was panic don't do that
and the second worst thing to do in
a panic situation is nothing right so we
should be doing something we want to go
faster look around is it scrape barnacles
is it a paint job is it a
bigger motor pick one of those things and
run with it you'll see a big a
bigger roi there
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
All right.
Yep.
So I'll make you look in the future.
Okay.
Three-year vision.
We always want,
I feel like I always ask you unfair
questions like,
I need you to look in the future,
right?
But if we're sitting here three years from
now,
what will the best run PT clinics have
been doing in twenty twenty six if they're
doing well in twenty twenty nine,
which feels like a fake number.
Twenty twenty twenty six feels like a fake
year from a movie.
But what will they have been doing
operationally different in twenty twenty
six so that they are high performing in
twenty twenty nine?
Yeah,
I think that the very first answer I
have to give is they'll be focusing in
twenty twenty six.
So, you know,
cutting through a whole bunch of nonsense,
determining what are their profitability
factors and then drawing back from that
what operational things need to change in
order to do that.
Yeah.
I mean, listen,
if we took a hundred practices from all
fifty different states,
there'd be some absolutely common threads
between them.
You know, we need more patients.
We need higher.
We need to get rid of some payers
that are low paying.
I mean, all the stuff you go,
you hear about at the conferences and you
hear speakers talk about ad nauseum.
So, you know, in twenty twenty six, like
I don't know, as a tech person,
you might think, well,
you should say something like do an
automated wait list or something like
that.
But the automated wait list is that's,
that's the, um, you know,
it's like the symptom versus the disease
kind of analogy.
Like, you know,
we need to understand what it is we're
trying to do.
And then we can back into how to
get there and hopefully not with
band-aids,
but with actual meaningful operational
changes.
And, um,
So they'll be focusing,
they will be implementing new things.
There's no question about that,
but they will be implementing them in a
measured way.
So,
twenty twenty six might be the year you
pick three or four initiatives that are
sort of tech based and you're like,
all right, yeah,
this is the year we're going to implement
online booking.
We're going to do an automated wait list.
We're going to jump into AI documentation.
And those are our three things.
And that's like one per quarter or
something or two per quarter or something
that's manageable.
And it spans the teams.
So like you'll have one that's for your
clinical team, kind of a tech goal,
one for your scheduling front desk
operations team, billing team,
all those sorts of things.
And your goal is not going to be
to change UnitedHealthcare's payment fee
schedule, at least not by itself, I think.
everybody wants that you know like and
vendors harp on that constantly because
they think that's a way for them to
get paid more it's like oh if we
can convince you that you can convince
united to pay you more than you could
pay us more too and everybody will be
happy it's a good goal there are advocacy
groups that do that but that's not a
business strategy that that's like a long
range uh kind of thing so get focused
Be reasonable, implement,
actually do the damn thing,
and then come out at the end and
then say, okay, let's do this.
And for AI,
I know I've harped on this,
but it does mean being very judicious.
The decisions may be to pass on something
or it's just too nascent.
It's just not there yet.
It's not worth your time to implement it
or the cost.
That's the other crazy thing about AI is
a lot of these, I think,
nascent things are very expensive.
And so it's kind of like when we
think about EMR, I mean,
what is a reasonable spend for an EMR
per provider per month?
I mean,
that's a question that we think we have
an answer because obviously we're selling
it.
So we have to have product market fit,
but
there are very wide ranging answers
amongst vendors.
I mean,
some people think it can be exponential.
I'm not of that mind personally,
but I think it needs to be and
continue to stay reasonable.
So you cannot triple your EMR spend this
year per provider and think that that's
going to like go well for you.
You just can't do that.
So that is something to be mindful of,
especially if you make that spend and then
you don't get any real meaningful benefit
out of it.
Yeah.
I've talked about this before,
and I feel like we haven't talked about
it in a while.
This is specific to you guys.
You meet people who are nodding along with
us on this episode or previous,
and they go, all right,
I'll take one step closer.
When someone comes to you or another EMR,
how do you walk them through like
what the future looks like do you let
them lead the conversation do you say do
you just do you essentially just feature
click through on a screen or like what's
the best way because a lot of times
they're like i know i need something
different what do you need i don't know
like so what's the best way for someone
to do a sort of a self-assessment to
go okay before i just go and book
all these calls with these emr people what
should i ask myself or be prepared because
you could waste a whole hour and get
no answers
Absolutely.
I always think tech starts with business.
So you need the first introspective
question is what is happening with my
practice?
What is happening with my business?
You know,
it could be that you're just annoyed with
your current system because literally
there are a few hangups that are driving
you nuts and that's just how it is.
But most of the time, I think,
you know,
these changes are precipitated by a
business, some kind of business case,
like
profit, revenue, patient acquisition,
staff burnout,
the usual ones that you hear.
And there's a goal or, and then there's,
there needs to be, you know,
let's use the good old analogy of the
patient.
You know, the practice is the patient.
We need to figure out what the issue
is.
Then we need to go through a diagnosis
phase where we're like,
why is this happening?
You know,
and really being reasonable about what
your expectations are and why you're
making a change.
And by the way,
you need to be able to articulate to
your staff while you're making the change.
So if you cannot articulate it to your
staff,
you will not be able to articulate it
to a vendor.
You know,
we are switching EMRs because I don't
know, because we just are.
I'm like, OK, well, that's you know,
that's interesting.
Like that could it could go great.
It could could not go great.
I suppose if you have no expectations.
you know it could just it you know
so what is the answer to that question
and and a lot of times yeah it's
very basic stuff like cost for my current
emr is grown out of control or reliability
is an issue or support sucks you know
all those different things come up but
oftentimes it should be it really needs to
be accompanied by the business case behind
why and then you can articulate to staff
then to the vendor and then they can
make the case for why they can solve
those problems for you
I like what you actually say and do,
say on your website, which is,
thirty minutes, no pressure,
friendly people.
Like when you go to book a call,
Because from a marketing guy, of course,
I'm going to look through the same lens.
You're a tech guy, EMR guy.
I look at it as like,
what do I have to give?
Thirty minutes.
That's pretty reasonable.
Is this, hey, come to Boca.
Go to a timeshare and we'll give you
free golf.
Is there strings?
And you're like, no pressure.
And then finally, it's like,
is this going to be sort of a
salesman that I got to weasel my way
out of the conversation?
You're like, friendly people.
It's like,
we might not be right for you.
This is the best sale, non-sale,
which is like,
I have no idea if I'm right for
you.
Maybe I am.
But thirty minutes.
Right.
No pressure.
Friendly people.
Let's walk through this.
And the answer might be no.
I have a take a wild guess.
If you onboard or you sell and I'm
using air quotes in a podcast.
If you sell someone who's not right for
empower that probably you probably lose
money on that in the short term if
they go and bail in eight or twelve
months.
It's not good for anybody.
It's not a win.
That's artificial growth.
Longevity is definitely a key metric for
us and wanting to have people stay because
they're happy.
And we have a very strong no jerks
policy here,
which I always encourage people to adopt.
No jerks, just
Don't hire any jerks.
I have a similar policy.
It's not the word jerk, though.
It's a different word, which is like, no,
that's rule one.
What's rule two?
See rule number one.
Just don't be a jerk.
It works itself out,
and jerks is a podcast-friendly term,
so it seems to work well.
You can insert whatever you want there
into what you think that is.
Yeah, but you need to...
I just think you need to help people.
That's that's really what it is.
And I I really empathize with practice
owners.
I know that they're so just it's crazy,
like they're crazy.
They're doing a lot.
They're trying to run the business.
Obviously,
people are people mostly only bring CEOs
problems.
That's that's the nature of being a CEO
is like you're the practice owner.
nine times out of ten people are coming
to you with a problem right they're not
coming to you to be like everything's
going so great this is the everything is
okay alarm and i'm ringing it everything
is okay they're coming to you because
there's an hr issue there's a pipe burst
got an issue with a patient like all
sorts of things so
you want to help people you want to
help the helpers and like help them figure
out what what they need to do in
order to be doing well and i think
the pt space has changed so much the
the business acumen has grown which i
think was so needed um there's so much
time spent debating the dpt uh credential
and whether that made you know now i'm
going back some years but whether that
made sense like should we elevate from the
masters you probably remember some of
those debates but
Now, I think the business side is,
you know,
having a bit of a catch up there.
And I think, you know,
coaching is very popular now.
That wasn't true five years ago.
I mentioned the influence of private
equity,
which I think is both good and bad
in different ways,
possibly more bad than good.
But that's maybe another discussion all to
its own.
What's the goal here?
And then just more people asking better
questions and trying to get better
answers.
So there's a lot of things changing.
I'm seeing it.
I mean, we're in twenty twenty six.
I graduated in twenty sixteen.
So there's a good ten year snapshot.
I'm seeing better questions from people
where
you know there's no such thing as a
bad question yes there is there are
terrible questions right right we're
supposed to say now like we want you
to ask the question the funny part is
it's a bad question but the thing at
the bottom the thing you're not asking but
you really want to know that's the better
question right that's what i mean by that
like yeah you know how do i get
paid to buy insurance it's like i don't
know what business you're in yet so we
got to ask more questions i'm seeing and
this could be biased i'm seeing people
with no business experience,
coming out of PT school,
asking better questions.
Because I think we're just talking about
it more.
So people might not have enrolled in an
MBA.
They're just like,
I'm sort of gleaning stuff from X or
LinkedIn and Facebook groups.
And they're starting on second base where
we used to start in the dugout.
Yeah, I agree.
I also think the market has gotten more
competitive on every front.
You have to be better to survive.
You just have to do better and be
better.
And that means you've got to learn faster.
And that means, like you said,
starting at a better place if you can
or reading the book or whatever.
And so I think all of that's true.
I know that's true in the EMR space.
You know, there's there's a lot of them.
There's a lot of choices now in the
space.
It wasn't always that way.
I can say that from direct experience.
But today there are lots of companies out
there and everybody's got their stick and
they're pushing out their stuff.
And that's also causing people to ask more
questions.
And so I think on the whole,
this trend is very good.
Like,
I think it's good for people to be
asking better questions, do better,
be better.
run a better business,
hopefully more survive, create more jobs.
There's all kinds of good things that come
from that.
What I don't want people to lose sight
of is just that there are some
fundamentals that are somewhat immutable.
They just don't change.
You need to run a good business.
You need to run a profitable business.
These things are always true.
They just don't change.
And how they get achieved may change over
time, the methods.
But, you know,
you just got to respect kind of the
laws of physics.
And, you know,
up is up and down is down.
And that's just the way it is sometimes.
And you don't need a very fancy business
consultant to tell you that.
You already know that.
You just, you know.
Sri, if you know what time it is,
it's time for the parting shot.
This is the parting shot.
One last mic drop moment.
No pressure.
Just your legacy on the line.
All right,
Party Shot brought to you by Empower EMR.
Of course, Sharif's here.
Your clinic is stuck in an EMR that
slows you down.
I mean, to put it frankly,
if it's slowing you down,
you don't have to use that.
This is your decision.
You are, and I hate to do this,
but you are empowered to make a choice.
I said I would never do that,
but I need to point out the obvious.
The obvious is sometimes the best
marketing.
You are empowered to change that.
It doesn't have to be with Sharif,
but it might be.
How do you know unless you go to
a call?
Empower, they like to say,
it gives you speed, clean workflows,
and features.
PT's actually asked for hard stop.
I love the people in Facebook groups who
are like, great,
I can make my note blue.
I don't need that.
I need it to be better or easier,
but thank you for letting me make the
template blue.
These are things people actually ask for.
Better notes, faster documentation,
smoother operations.
Please pay attention to those matters.
If you can wrap it up into customer
support that also doesn't ghost you,
that's terribly important.
People look for that.
We talked earlier.
Do you like talking to AI on the
phone?
Yeah, when appropriate,
when I can just do two things.
And sometimes when I have a real problem,
I want a human to sit down with
me until it's solved.
That's what you get.
So you can do that.
Upgrade your clinic's brain with Empower
EMR.
Maybe it's not right for you.
But the one way to find out,
you go to empoweremr.com,
you click on a demo,
and here's what you get.
It's right on the website.
So it must be true, right?
Thirty minutes, no pressure,
friendly people.
And in twenty nine and a half minutes,
you're probably like, OK,
this isn't right.
That's OK.
That's good.
Or, hey, maybe this is.
That's good.
More decisions.
Right.
Not a sales pitch conversation.
All right.
I've talked a lot.
Parting shot.
One thing you want to leave with the
audience as we wrap up today.
So the one parting thought is AI,
cautiously.
So I would say I'm optimistic about the
future.
We're undertaking, obviously,
lots of changes and additions to our
product to meet the growing demand and
capabilities of AI.
But cautious optimism, I think,
is really what's needed.
And that will put you on the right,
it's the right frame of mind,
because it puts you in the frame of
mind that progress is what you need and
moving forward is what you need.
But you do it, you know, cautiously,
carefully, prudently,
so you're not taking on things that don't
work, costs that are unnecessary.
or building up unnecessary burnout or all
the sort of collateral damage things that
can happen with the wrong thing.
So let's go forward.
Let's be cautiously optimistic and keep
working and see what's doing and what's
not and then adjust.
Trust, but verify.
There you go.
Again, Sharif, appreciate this.
This is part two.
We'll bring you back next time for part
three in the series.
But here's the thing.
This isn't a three-part series.
This is something you should be paying
attention and spending time asking
yourself better questions.
That's really what I get from
conversations with you.
You're not telling people what to think.
you're essentially saying,
this is maybe how you might want to
think about because you are a different
practice,
no matter what your specialty is or where
you are in the growth cycle.
So instead of what to think,
how to think, Sharif,
appreciate the time here in part two of
the series.
Yeah.
Thanks, Jimmy.
Great to be here.
That's it for this one,
but we're just getting warmed up.
Smash follow, send it to a friend,
or crank up the next episode.
Want to go deeper?
Hit us at pgpiecast.com.
Or find us on YouTube and socials at
pgpiecast.
And legally, none of this was advice.
It's for entertainment purposes only.
See, Keith?
We read the script.
Happy now?