AI Isn’t Replacing PTs — It’s Replacing Inefficiency

0:00 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.

0:41 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.

1:22 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.

2:02 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.

2:43 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?

3:28 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.

4:11 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.

4:52 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.

5:34 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.

6:23 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.

7:04 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.

7:44 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.

8:33 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.

9:16 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.

9:59 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.

10:45 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.

11:27 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.

12:34 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.

13:18 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.

14:10 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?

15:02 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.

15:43 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.

16:26 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.

17:15 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.

18:04 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.

18:47 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.

19:36 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.

20:19 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.

21:06 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.

21:47 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.

22:34 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.

23:21 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.

24:01 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.

25:08 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.

25:49 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.

26:32 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.

27:52 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.

28:57 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.

29:37 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.

30:18 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.

31:03 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.

31:44 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.

32:24 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.

33:05 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.

33:46 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.

34:28 It's for entertainment purposes only. See, Keith? We read the script. Happy now?