Before You Buy Another AI Tool, Ask This Question First
Last Tuesday evening, something happened that I think every independent healthcare practice owner needs to hear about.
We hosted a private roundtable, AI, Automation & the Smart Practice, and brought together five of the most thoughtful people I know in the healthcare technology space. Practice owners joined from across the United States, Canada, Nigeria, Australia, and Barbados. An executive director of a major medical association was in the room. Physicians, practice managers, consultants, and healthcare leaders showed up on a Tuesday evening because they were tired of the noise and ready for real answers.
What followed was 90 minutes of honest, warm, occasionally funny conversation that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
This post is my attempt to share what came out of that room, because the people who weren't there deserve to hear it too.
The Question That Changes Everything
Before we did anything else, before introductions, before the diagnostic, before a single guest said a word, I asked the room one question.
Is this a people problem, a process problem, or a tools problem?
Because here's what I've seen over and over again in my work with independent practice owners: most practices skip this question entirely. They go straight to the demo.
That's where things go wrong.
A tool dropped on a people problem makes the people problem worse. A tool dropped on a process problem just makes it faster and more expensive. Only when it's actually a tools problem does technology become the right answer.
If you take nothing else from this post, take that question. Write it on a sticky note. Put it somewhere you'll see it before your next vendor demo.
What Five Experts Taught a Room Full of Practice Owners
Dr. Sarah Baldwin: Diagnose Before You Prescribe
Dr. Sarah Baldwin is a family physician in British Columbia with a focused practice in dermatology and pain management. She's also someone who spent close to 30 hours a week on administration before she decided to do something about it.
She called it her paperwork allergy. Her staff could tell when she'd been doing too much of it because she'd start to cough.
What Sarah did next is the part worth paying attention to. She didn't download another app. She didn't book another demo. She sat down and mapped her workflows — over 4,000 of them, over the course of four to five years — starting with the ones causing her the most pain.
"I wouldn't start a patient on treatment without knowing what I'm treating. The same goes for practice software."
That reframe: applying clinical diagnostic thinking to business operations, is one of the most powerful things an independent practice owner can do. You were trained to diagnose. Use that skill on your own practice.
Her other insight: you don't have to do it all at once. Start small. Each small win builds confidence for you and your team. Buy-in comes from results, and results come from starting somewhere manageable.
Brett Spark: You Can't Fix What You Can't See
Brett Spark is the co-founder of Aroris Health, a platform that helps independent practices understand and optimize their payer contracts. His opening statement stopped the room: after six years and more than 200 clients, Aroris has never worked with a practice that had all of its payer contracts in hand. Not one.
Most practices have no clear picture of how they're being reimbursed, whether payments match their contracts, or when those contracts are up for renewal. The complexity isn't accidental; it benefits payers when practices don't fully understand their agreements.
"Visibility is the starting line. You cannot negotiate, advocate, or make good decisions without that foundation."
His advice for practice owners evaluating any technology solution: before you look at what a tool does, understand where you actually stand. Financially, operationally, contractually. When evaluating any solution, ask not just what it reveals, but what you'll be able to do with that information once you have it.
Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz: Whose Values Was This Tool Built to Serve?
Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz is a Decolonial Social Scientist, technologist, and creator of Justice AI GPT and SOMA. He spends his days auditing AI systems and helping healthcare practices ask the questions most people never think to ask.
His contribution to Tuesday's conversation was the one that made the room go quiet.
"Before you adopt any AI tool, ask the vendor: what biases does this model carry from its training data? Which populations is it least reliable for? Has anyone outside your company independently evaluated it?"
He shared a story about a dermatologist in Denver who had been practicing for 30 years and realized, as his patient population diversified, that he was misdiagnosing patients. Not from lack of care, but from lack of the right tools and frameworks to see what he wasn't trained to see.
Christian brought Justice AI into the practice. Within weeks, two patients who had been misdiagnosed for years were correctly diagnosed and treated. The Indian patient told the doctor she felt seen for the first time, possibly ever, in a medical setting.
The right AI tool, built with intention and diverse data, doesn't just reduce administrative burden. It expands what's possible in patient care. You don't have to choose between efficiency and values. But you do have to ask whose values the tool was built to serve.
Damien Adler: Don't Automate a Bad Process
Damien Adler is the co-founder of Zanda Health, a practice management platform used by thousands of health practices across Australia, North America, Europe, and beyond. Before he built it, he ran a private psychology practice in Australia for 15 years, and watched administration threaten to eat the joy out of the work he loved.
He and his wife eventually built a practice that could run without them. They took month-long vacations in Europe while it kept growing. When his wife became seriously ill, the practice kept running because the systems were solid enough to hold it.
His framework is simple and worth writing down:
Eliminate first. Automate second. Delegate third.
Don't speed up something that shouldn't exist. Clean up your workflows before you digitize them, or you'll just make your problems faster and more expensive.
His other insight: start with the destination. Before you look at any software, get clear on what you're actually trying to create. What does the practice look like when it's working the way you imagined it would when you were in training? That clarity shapes every system you build.
Robert Lapp: Stop Hitting Whack-A-Mole
Robert Lapp is a Global Technology Advisor at C3 Tech Advisors. He doesn't sell tools. He helps organizations figure out what they actually need before they invest in more technology, and he's seen every version of the mistakes that happen when that process gets skipped.
He called the most common pattern whack-a-mole. One problem surfaces. You buy something to fix it. Three months later another problem surfaces. You buy something else. Before long you have five systems that don't talk to each other, an expensive monthly bill, and workflows that are more complicated than when you started.
The fix: stop treating symptoms and start understanding what's underneath them. And his most actionable advice. Before your next demo, know three things:
The specific problem you're solving for. The measurable result that would tell you it's working. The question you'll ask the vendor to hold them accountable for that result.
"Hold vendors accountable for outcomes, not methods."
The Thread That Ran Through Everything
Five guests. Five completely different lenses — clinical, financial, ethical, operational, and advisory. And one thread running through every single conversation:
Slow down to speed up.
The practices that get AI and automation right are not the ones who move fastest. They're the ones who get clear first. They diagnose before they prescribe. They know what they're solving for before they open a single demo. They hold vendors accountable for results, not features.
That's not a technology strategy. That's a leadership strategy. And it's available to every independent practice owner who's willing to pause long enough to use it.
Your Next Step
If this conversation is landing for you, there are two things I'd invite you to do.
First, complete The Smart Practice Diagnostic — a free, structured self-assessment that maps where your practice is actually losing ground across administrative, operational, clinical, and patient experience categories. It takes about five minutes and it will change how you think about your next technology decision.
🔗 Take the diagnostic: practicesuccess.co/smart-practice-diagnostic
Second, if you want to watch the full roundtable conversation, including the Q&A where our guests answered real questions from practice owners about which workflows to automate first, how to evaluate AI tools, and what to do before your next demo. The replay is available by request.
🎥 Request the replay: Click here to request the replay
About Tracy Cherpeski
Tracy Cherpeski, MBA, MA, CPSC is a business consultant and executive coach who works exclusively with independent healthcare practice owners. She is the founder of Tracy Cherpeski International and the Thriving Practice Community, and the host of the Thriving Practice Podcast — ranked in the top 5% globally and downloaded in 60+ countries.
Her work focuses on helping practice owners slow down long enough to see what's actually happening in their practices, and then build the systems, strategies, and leadership capacity to move forward with clarity.
If you found this post valuable, share it with an independent practice owner who needs to hear it. And if you're one of our guest experts reading this, thank you! The room was better because you were in it.