Running a solo practice is a major step for any orthopedic surgeon, and Travis Doering, MD, is also hoping to leverage AI in a unique way with his endeavor.
Dr. Doering, a hand and upper extremity surgeon in Austin, Texas, said he has been thinking about making the leap to running his own practice over the past couple of years.
“It’s definitely something that has always appealed to me having an entrepreneurial mindset,” he said on Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast. “I’m really excited for the opportunities that it’s going to allow because, when it comes down to it, it’s all about the patients. They need to feel secure, they need to feel confident, and they get to know that there is a human at the other end of the line if they really need somebody.”
He said one of his top priorities is designing his practice to be “the first AI native medical clinic in the country.” The practice is opening on June 1, and his AI strategy will focus on local AI over cloud-based tools.
“By starting my own practice and keeping it limited to just myself, the hardware constraints are lower,” he said. “The beauty of this is that by keeping all the processing local, none of those tasks are getting sent off to the cloud. Once the hardware costs have been paid for, there’s no subscriptions.”
Another advantage of local AI systems is that patient data remains in the in-house hardware. For Dr. Doering that’s a stack of Mac Studios.
“There are consumer-grade and professional-grade hardware at a variety of price points, but that has gotten good enough that if you are willing to pay a little bit of a premium right now … you can essentially replicate that exact functionality [of Claude or ChatGPT] whether it’s just as a chat interface or more of the administrative and backend tasks behind the scenes entirely locally,” Dr. Doering said. “None of your data is going to one of those cloud providers. You don’t need to worry if any of your patients’ data is going to get included in future training sets. That’s really helpful on my end, and it engenders a higher level of trust with patients … by keeping all that locally, not only am I able to offset some of the per token per task costs, but also able to provide a much higher level of data security than competitors.”
With AI, Dr. Doering said it will be important to “keep a human in the loop” and find a balance between human expertise and AI assistance.
“The employees and the practices that are most successful are the ones that are going to be able to integrate AI with their humans to augment their abilities rather than trying to directly replace them,” he said. “The real things that I’m most interested in are orchestration layers, because you can have these individual tasks or skills that AI has, but then how do you put it all together? You can replace a biller or coder with AI, or they can serve as a receptionist, but how do you get those two different modules to talk to one another? The practices that are going to really be most successful are the ones that are best able to integrate those orchestration layers, but then use them to augment rather than to replace their current staff.”
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