Where AI Actually Helps the Business Side of Your Practice
By Mike Woo-Ming, MD, MPH
Almost every conversation about AI in medicine points at the exam room. Will it read the scan, write the note, catch the diagnosis you missed at 6pm on a Friday.
Fair enough. But if you own a practice, that's not where your evenings are going. Your evenings are going to the job description you've been meaning to write, the patient email you've rewritten four times, the policy nobody ever wrote down, the spreadsheet you stare at without ever quite reading. Nobody trained you for any of that. There's no fellowship in "running the thing."
That's where I've gotten the most out of these tools by a wide margin. Not the clinical side. The side you're doing at 10pm because there's no one else to hand it to.
The stuff you keep rewriting
Start with anything you write over and over in slightly different words.
The email explaining your new-patient process. The follow-up you send after a consult. The response to "do you take my insurance." The reminder about pre-visit instructions. You've written each of these dozens of times from scratch, badly, at the end of a long day.
Give the tool your rough version and your actual constraints — who it's for, what tone you want, how long, what it must not say — and let it hand you a draft. You'll edit it. That's the point. Editing takes four minutes; starting from nothing takes forty and never happens.
Same with the things you've been avoiding because they're big and dull. A job posting. An onboarding checklist. The written version of a process that currently lives in one employee's head and walks out the door if she quits. Ask for a first pass. Fix what's wrong. You just did a thing that's been on your list since March.
Making the numbers talk
Most practice owners I know have data they don't use. Not because they're lazy — because opening the report is thirty minutes of squinting, and the day never has a spare thirty minutes.
Drop a de-identified export in and ask it plain questions in ordinary English. Which service lines are actually growing. What the no-show pattern looks like by day of week. Where the schedule gaps cluster. What changed since last quarter.
You'd get there yourself with enough time and a stiff coffee. The tool gets you there in six minutes, which means you'll actually do it — and doing it monthly beats doing it brilliantly once a year.
Two cautions. Nothing identifiable goes near a general-purpose tool — and "de-identified" means more than deleting the names, so if you're not certain what qualifies, ask whoever handles this for your practice before anything leaves your system. Second, check the arithmetic yourself. It will be wrong sometimes and it will not tell you.
Getting your marketing out of your head
This is the one physicians resist and benefit from most.
You know things. Years of them. But turning what you know into a talk, a page, an email, a video script is a skill you never trained for, and so it doesn't get done, and so the practice down the street that's half as good at medicine is twice as visible.
Talk it out instead. Record yourself explaining something to a patient — the thing you say fifty times a month — and have the tool turn the transcript into a draft. Now you're not writing. You're correcting. Completely different task, and much better raw material, because what you actually say to patients is always better than what you'd have typed.
One rule I don't bend: it has to still sound like you. If it comes back smooth and vaguely corporate, throw it out and put your own words back in. Nobody wants a practice that reads like every other practice. Your voice is most of why a patient picks you.
Where I keep it out
Let me be equally clear about the other side.
Patient information doesn't go into consumer tools. If a tool isn't built for healthcare and you don't have the proper agreements in place, it doesn't get patient data. Not "probably fine." Not once. If you wouldn't paste it into a public forum, don't paste it into a chatbot with a free plan.
Clinical judgment stays yours. These tools are useful, confident, and wrong often enough that you can't outsource the call. Sitting next to you as a second opinion? Sure. Making the decision? No.
And anything going out under your name gets read by you first. Every time. No exceptions on the nights you're tired. Once you hit send, it's yours, and "the software wrote it" has never been an answer anybody accepts.
Treat it like a very fast junior hire
The mental model that's served me best: you've hired someone extremely quick, tireless, well-read, with no judgment and no stake in the outcome.
You'd give that person the first draft of a job posting. You'd have them clean up a spreadsheet. You'd absolutely not let them talk to a patient unsupervised or sign anything.
And you'd learn to brief them properly, because a vague instruction gets a vague result. "Write me something about weight loss" gets you slop. "Write a 200-word email to patients who finished their first month, warm, no hype, ends with an invitation to book a follow-up" gets you something usable. The quality of what you get out tracks the quality of what you put in, almost exactly.
The part that compounds
I built and sold a software company before AI could write a sentence. What took a small team and a lot of money then, you can now do at your kitchen table in an evening. That's not a small thing. The business side of medicine has never been this cheap to run.
So I'm not asking you to overhaul anything. Pick the two tasks you resent most — the two you'd hand to a person tomorrow if you had one — and get AI doing those well. Not five. Two.
When you've got those hours back, pick two more. That's the whole method.
Dr. Mike Woo-Ming is a Mayo Clinic-trained physician, practice owner, and founder of BootstrapMD. He's the author of The Positioned Physician: Earn More, Work Smart, Love Medicine Again. Learn more at michaelwooming.com.
This is general educational information, not legal, medical, or compliance advice.
