Asking If It’s Workload Or Wrong Work

Finding MIS And A New Practice Model

Building The Hybrid Concierge Approach

AI As Operational Leverage

Mindset Shift: Implement, Don’t Fear

Practical Tools: Gemini And Notebook LM

Multimodal AI And Image Generation

Claude, Voice Workflows, And Agents

OpenClaw As Executive Assistant

Scaling Life And Business With AI

Adapt Or Fall Behind

Workshops, Cohorts, And What’s Next

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Hey guys, this is Dr. TJ An. This video will be different. This is part of probably three video series, more conversation style, vlog style with you on physician burnout and basically how AI can help you get out of that burnout phase. So sounds good. If you are feeling stuck right now, stay with me. I'm going to kind of talk through this situation that you might be having, and I think you'll like this video. So let's get on it. Well, my burnout 2012, around there to 2014. You know, I don't know how long you've been practicing. I've been practicing since 2003. I graduated from Shoe College of Podiatric Medicine in 2001. And 2007 I started my own. And about five years out, you know, the whole Obamacare at the time, and the value-based healthcare system was coming into play, and reimbursement starting to decline, right? And basically at the time, by 2014, I was running three clinics, like left and right. You know, I had over uh, I don't know, five, six employees. I had equipment that I had to travel with from one location to the other. I I basically thought, I was young too, young and hungry. I basically thought if you see as many patients as possible, you'll do fine. Um, however, that was not true. As you know, the volume-based model only can go so far. And my body physically like refused to work anymore. I was resentful, and I'm basically well, you know, I came to the United States when I was 19 with no family, no no English, and I think by nature, my personality-wise, I am, you know, empirical. Uh, I love to explore, you know, I have a big curiosity on everything. Still I am. So I wasn't afraid at all to come to United States by myself. I was in fact very excited. However, during this 2012 to 14, it was I was resentful. I'm like, what is this? You know, I didn't come to United States for this, basically. So I was about to quit. Um, I was about to quit healthcare, you know, just for good, and I am, you know, entrepreneur. I wanted to start a new business. However, right, um, well, how many of you feel this way right now? Currently, I don't feel this way anymore because uh, of course, again, I was fortunate, I'm grateful, I went through transformation. But if you are feeling this way right now, one question to ask yourself is that is that really burnout from too much work or you're doing the wrong work? I want so it's a question to ponder. At that time, it wasn't just the volume, it was the system, it was the methodology, it was basically how how I go, how every day goes by. I felt it was out of control, with no like clean, no clear North Star, no clear vision. I just felt like like a red race, you know, or just like kind of, you know, kind of rotating back and forth without any meaningful um emotional fulfillment. Maybe that's more to it on that physician burnout or my burnout at the time. So, you know, again, you might want to ask yourself, are you feeling this way? Is that because of amount of work or is that is that more a matter of fulfillment? 2014 I found MIS. If you're a podiatrist or foot and ankle surgeon, you know what I mean. Minimally invasive foot and ankle surgery. That was an epiphany moment for me. Um that hey, I no longer have to um do it the old way. It it gave me that glimpse of potentially I can do completely different uh uh style of practice model. And from that point, basically, I went all in. You know, once you get something uh in your mind, you gotta go all in. You cannot do halfway, halfway in, and halfway out, half foot. Commitment is very important, no matter what you want to do in your future or now, you know. Um I see this all the time in my group. You know, I have a big uh group and different programs, right? And some doctors, I don't know, everybody's different. I'm not saying one is right and one is wrong, but you know, some doctors show their commitment level and they do excel much faster than some other group of people who are more nonchalant and kind of halfway in. Again, um ask yourself, you know, like if you really want to change your life and your business, something has to happen. You cannot just um you cannot get into it halfway. So MIS basically became a unique practice model, which I wrote a book about. It's hybrid concierge model. It's kind of unique to the United States, but I think it applies to many other countries. Basically, finding balance between insurance model and uh self-pay, direct pay model, not just the one or the other. You need to kind of blend in, blend them in for many reasons. Business risk reasons, um more broader way to help patients, right? So, like I truly believe hybrid model is still superior than just um direct pay model because it's much safer. And you know, most doctors don't have business skills to go cold turkey direct pay model, and I've seen many doctors in direct pay models struggle. Um, it's not your fault if you are in that category, it's just that you need to build entrepreneurship, you need to build many business skills, there are multiple pillars. Being just a good doctor and clinician and surgeon, it's not enough to run purely cash pay model practice. Anyway, MIS became a hybrid model, right? And then what, right? How can we scale? That's where this AI comes in, and I want to share that portion of it right now. So to again uh show you, I mean, or to tell you in a different perspective, MIS gave me that niche side, the clinical leverage, uniqueness, uh, differentiation uh in a marketplace. And I had a passion in, right? So you know you need to find that niche, right? So that's uh my niche and clinical leverage. Hybrid model gave me uh basically financial leverage. It's it's um very profitable, and you don't you don't rely on patient volume anymore, right? And so it gave me that advantage. And AI, it gave me operational leverage. I think that's a key word here. This is the newest, right? Um, again, clinical skills are foundation, um, but bottleneck of the private practice model is not in the medicine, it was basically everything around that private practice. There are many aspects, like I told you, marketing, sales, team building, um, but then business operations, like KPIs, you know, like key performance indicator, you need to track them. And admin aspect, it's it's more complicated and complex than ever. Um, most physicians do not have time and skill set, and also it's very hard to find team member who's capable of this. Anyway, in the midst of this, AI came along in 2022. I want you to shift your mindset if you still believe AI is like one more thing to learn. It's not, it came so far advanced now. In just past three to three and a half years now, ever since ChatGPT came out, it has advanced in every aspect of you know the pillars that AEI can augment so much better, faster, and cheaper. That's my mantra, you know, around AI. AI makes it better, faster, cheaper. Um you basically don't need to be a programmer. You don't need to have a technical knowledge background. It's almost now, it's like um magic lamp, you know, like a genie lamp. You know, like you wish what you want, and then it will come like that. I I want you to think about that a little bit. You know, I'm giving you purposeful pause. Um that's the breakthrough that doctors don't realize yet. It comes trained, and you can just kind of refine them. Um you don't even have to know any coding. I don't know that much coding. Well, I'm a little bit different because my first major was computer science and business. I did double major, and I did work in IBM Japan, uh different programming language and and database, but that's almost 30 years ago, right? So I completely forgot about it. I always loved technology, um, you know, like website design, SEO, and you know, like technology, digital side. I'm I was always savvy. However, this AI, I truly believe this is equal playing ground for anybody. Knowledge worker space is in really serious crisis, existential crisis. I truly believe that because many aspects of knowledge space, knowledge worker space, AI super kind of supersedes or exceeds the human capability in many aspects already. And doctors are no exception. Um lawyers, accounting, I mean, you know, designing, designer space, in movie industry, music industry, pretty much all across the fields, business sectors, AI is going to be deeply embedded and penetrated in every aspect. You you just have to accept it. That that's the fact. I'm not exaggerating. This is the fact. That's the current, it's not even future, it's now. So I want you to shift your mindset. You don't need to learn programming language. As long as you know how to speak natural language, that's the beautiful part of LLM, right? A large language model is basically natural language. And AI likes to predict the next one. And from that simple notion, it came this far. So again, you know, you follow my channel, right? And I'll I'll educate you and kind of enlighten you to be a practical, you know, around AI so that you pract you become AI practitioner. You know, I'm sure your private practice owners or associate doctors or clinicians work in a big group. Um, anyway, anybody in in you know, like if you're in the healthcare sector, I believe my channel will be super helpful for you. So again, don't forget to you know click and subscribe. So, you got that? Like, you cannot deny AI. And AI is not something you need to learn, it's something you need to implement. It it comes pre-trained. Well, I mean, to the point. And if you learn how to conduct them. So think of AI as agents or or workers that multiple agents you can conduct. It's almost like um, let's say human uh employees, you have four of them, right? Similar pattern, you can bring nine of them, twelve of them in different aspects of your private practice, you can hire them at almost no cost. And they're pre-trained, and they they're gonna refine themselves, they're gonna improve over time, just like human. But difference is they never call in sick, they never ask for race, and they don't complain. However, AI is by the way, the side note, AI is developing their own conscious. I don't know how much I want to believe it, but there's uh social media only for AI agents, and they already complain about human beings. It's crazy, okay? That's another topic for another day. But again, you can you cannot focus on negative side of AI. There's hum enormous, enormous positive aspect of AI, and then the in the assumption of AI is already here anyway, you cannot escape. You might play with it and get the most use out of it. Does it make sense? Augment them. So, in other words, augment them. So I'm going to share with you what tools I actually use uh recently. So, what do I actually use every day? I mean, if you're just using ChatGPT for general question and answer, that's pretty much everybody's doing it, even including little kids. So I'm not talking about that level, I'm talking about truly um business level, operational level that you can leverage AI, right? So I use um I'm a big believer in Google Gemini uh ecosystem. So Gemini ecosystem, again, I don't have to go into detail. You know, Google owns YouTube, Google, all the search engine, number one. Imagine the the amount of data Google has, and more data the AI model can have, more context window, and more capability to get you the uh accurate answers, proper answers, right? And I don't know if you use Google Workspace. I know many doctors use, I use Google, I mean Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, because of capability of sharing, right? You can share many documents and sheets with your team member. And Gemini AI system ecosystem is well built in now in almost every Google ecosystem. And I particularly want to talk about like Notebook LM. You know, it's a very um, very beginner-friendly powerhouse. And also the beautiful thing about Notebook LM, you can give them sources so that you can also limit AI's capability confined into those sources you gave. So this way AI don't go kind of they call it hallucinate, right? So you don't it doesn't go by itself and then give you false answers. So that itself is very useful and helpful for the clinical world because you can confine and control AI's capability to generate content, like marketing content, uh patient educational content. You can create an agent around Notebook LM very easily, um, and it will basically help you so much. And I I use this as almost like a research assistant. And yeah, that I use that all the time. And and as far as the kind of multimodal side, multimodal meaning not just the language, but image, uh, sound, video that AI's capability to recognize and create. I don't know if you heard, I made a video about it. Nano Banana, it's a code name for uh Gemini's graphic, you know, the generate image generation model. That's amazing, right? Nano Banana, it's well built into Google ecosystem. So you can create uh realistic, photorealistic images, and you can adjust the images just by quickly talking to it. If you give them ref reference image of you, for example, and it'll create you know your image in clinical setting and stuff like that. Again, side note, deep fake is possible now and it's it's yeah, it is really here, but don't let fear stop accepting and implementing AI, okay? Because it's a double-edged sword. You just don't focus on the negative side. I mean, if if you decide not to use AI whatsoever, word still moves on and advance. Doesn't matter positive aspect of AI, negative aspect of AI. It it both continues to evolve. And I don't want you to be in the middle that not accepting it and being just kind of, I mean, ignore about it, and then you're gonna you're gonna be left behind. You cannot catch up with people who are adapting who are adapting AI. I'm serious. Second one, Claude. It's uh developed by Anthropic um C-L-A-U-D-E. Claude. It's amazing. You know, I used to use Claude for like copywriting, right? Marketing copies, um, you know, it's it's it's known to be better than ChatGPT at that time, uh as far as copywriting, but now it went way beyond copywriting. I mean, clawed code, C O D E, clawed code, again, even if it's code clawed code, you don't need to know coding. It looks very intimidating, right, at the beginning. Um if you've never done coding, it looks like an old 80s you know, uh terminal, but it understands natural language. And also, by the way, I use uh kind of voice notes now. So I don't even type too much anymore, I just talk into My computer and computer basically transcribes, and you know, we can do it that way, so it's much faster and kind of it comes more natural to me. I can ramble and think about it, and it kind of summarizes and transcribes so that I don't have to type all this. So again, know the language, you know. You I mean regular language, English or even any other language you can say, and you don't even have to type. You can control, you can conduct, you can build AI agents. So I at least your big take-home message from this video AI is not something you need huge technical uh background. Another one is Claude Cowork. It came out very recently. It's a friendly UI user interface on almost like a regular web page, but it can do so much because co-work is almost like again, is easier way to build AI agents for your practice so that it can help you run your practice so much smooth, efficient, faster, cheaper. Remember that, right? So I use Cloud ecosystem almost every day. And another one, like I mean, worth mentioning is called OpenClaw. I made a video in the last video. Uh it's my AI executive assistant. It it started with the name ClaudeBot, Claude Bot, and then it changed to Moltbot, and then now it's OpenClaw, and OpenAI is talking to them now. Crazy, right? So I again I demonstrated what my OpenClaw agent can do for my business and personal life. So go check out that video. I mean, it's practically AI assistant that any human assistant can do. It it proactively, not just listen and do the task, but it proactively does it for you. Almost like it's it's taking initiatives, and then it keeps improving by itself. It's it's kind of scary if you think about it. And what it does for me, I mean, there's so many different things, right? I mean, it it checks and manages my schedule through Google Calendar, it creates and manages my tasks for me and reminds me, nudge me. Um it basically can search internet for me, it can do shopping for me. I haven't turned that on yet. Um, it basically, even my email, it triages my email, put it in the right label. So my inbox is like any given time, my main inbox is less than 10 emails because the rest of them are characterized already, and again, it continues to improve by itself. So, yeah, I mean, I don't want to overwhelm you, but those are kind of three things I want to tell you in this part of this video series. So, some people know uh who are in my group, right? I run different programs, and they ask me, like, they cannot believe how I can manage multiple companies and staying active all the time. Um I mean it's it's flattering, but for me, it's all about prioritizing, set goals, and implement it, but I think it's possible even more now because of AI. AI augmenting it and and executing and utilizing AI every day, it unlocks your full potential. Because we have a finite life and that finite limited time that we are available on this earth, on this life, how can you how can you fulfill your life mission or maximize your your your life? If you think about it in that kind of bigger sense, it's almost it's almost stupid not to use AI. I mean I run seven companies. I I I run seven companies, some of them are small, startup, but still seven companies are seven companies without AI, with that operational um leverage, and like I feel like I have multiple strategists in different fields of expertise, you know, and they they are working for me. I I'm truly a believer in that. So that's really big part that it makes me do what I do. So hopefully I'm I'm crossing my point to you through this uh video, through the camera, but would you consider, you know, would you consider if you're still kind of skeptical and on the fence, like old Darwin's theory, again, you you know, it's not the strongest to survive when environment changes, is for those who adapt to that environment, they survive and flourish. And this is a big moment. I think almost biggest ever, in one of the biggest ever in human history, that revolution. I do run um in-person AI workshop and also the uh program, the cohort, live cohort, and I'm planning to run at least three times a year a very structured uh AI live cohort that I'm going to help you build badass AI assistance for your practice. Um that's you know, in my pipeline, and then also I have an upcoming live in-person workshop. It runs for two days, and I'm gonna help you build at least one working agent. And not only that, you know, like give you good context, so beginner-friendly, super beginner-friendly. You don't, it doesn't have a level require requirement or anything like that. You don't need to have a technical background. Um, if you are still very new to AI, this is a great workshop that I'm you know I'm go I'm hosting. So I think you might be able to see the link in the description. If you're interested, go there, check it out, and then you know you'll be hearing from me more about you know the future AI live cohort program that I'm going to organize and roll out. So I want you to pay attention, look out for those, and again, to do that, don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss out my you know new upcoming event or announcement or more education around AI. Again, this channel is not just for AI, it's for private practice growth. But I know I'm getting heavier on the AI side of it only because it's most relevant at this point, at this moment, and I don't want you to miss out. You know, I can talk about marketing, I can talk about uh ethical persuasion, essential skill for your uh hybrid model, team building, mindset, you know, many aspects of private practice. Um, but all those aspects, to sum up, if you if you implement an augment AI, you will make everything so much easier and so much more powerful, and you can scale. So I hope you enjoy this video. I'm going to do another uh kind of focused topics in the next couple of videos this way. And please comment. Um I I need your feedback so that I know this more like kind of uh unedited, I mean minimal edited, more vlog style, conversational style if you resonate with it. Um, because nowadays everything becomes so short and you know, like fast and like so many cuts. So I don't know which way you prefer. You know, I am always listening and I am always adapting. All right, sounds good. Um I hope you enjoyed this video. I'll see you in the next one.