Rae Woods (00:19):
From Advisory Board, we are bringing you a Radio Advisory, your weekly download on how to untangle healthcare's most pressing challenges. I'm Rae Woods.

Abby Burns (00:28):
I'm Abby Burns. I'm actually excited for today's conversation. We are doing something that we don't do all that often, which is to genuinely co-host a Radio Advisory episode.

Rae Woods (00:39):
And we get to do it on one of my very favorite topics, which is the physician landscape.

Abby Burns (00:45):
It's actually been a minute since we talked about the physician workforce on Radio Advisory, and a lot has changed.

Rae Woods (00:52):
A lot has changed. Physicians are practicing differently, the kinds of entities that employ those physicians have changed. Advanced practice providers now play a much bigger role in care delivery. And frankly, the organizations responsible for delivering care are now facing a much more complicated financial reality and clinical reality, which is something that we spend a lot of our time talking about on this podcast.

Abby Burns (01:18):
Yeah. So, I think the crux of the question for our conversation today is where does the provider workforce actually stand in 2026?

Rae Woods (01:25):
But I also want to have our eyes set on the future because you can't have a conversation about physicians without talking about the idea, the prediction that we don't have enough of them. And this is where I want us to talk to our colleague, Daniel Kuzmanovich, because he and I and Advisory Board made a pretty bold claim about a decade ago to say that that prediction was fundamentally flawed. That we would only face a physician shortage if the industry did nothing in the face of some of the very challenges facing our doctors. I want to check in on that assumption. So I vote we talk to Daniel, name all the change that's happened, and see where his prediction stands today.

Abby Burns (02:09):
Let's do it.

(02:11):
Hey Daniel, welcome back to Radio Advisory.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (02:14):
Thanks for having me.

Rae Woods (02:16):
Daniel, my favorite person and my favorite topic.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (02:21):
If you learn about physicians, you will understand healthcare a lot better than if you don't.

Abby Burns (02:26):
Well said, and actually that's a perfect entryway into our conversation. There is always a case to be made that we need to talk about the clinical workforce if we're talking about healthcare business. What is the case that you'd make for why we need to talk about physicians and advanced practice providers right now?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (02:44):
I got three thoughts on that. First one is the classic, well, we don't talk about them enough. I feel like that is actually true now more than at, maybe, any other time. Hospitals and ambulatory clinics, and you name any part of healthcare and you take the APP or the physician, dare I say, the clinician, out of them, they don't really work as well, do they? They don't make any money and they don't take good care of patients if we take the clinicians out of the equation.

Rae Woods (03:09):
Yeah, care delivery without the deliverers of care doesn't exactly work.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (03:12):
Another one that comes up for me right now is we have a ton of change happening in American healthcare. And we're talking a lot about strategies, but are we talking as much about the people that are going to deliver on the strategies as we should be?

Rae Woods (03:26):
I want to talk about the physicians, but before we get there, I want to also talk about the physician landscape because as you and I have spent a lot of time talking about, Daniel, the physician landscape has been reshaping itself pretty significantly over the last few years. And really, it's just been a while since we've talked about that on Radio Advisory. So if we think about the physician workforce through the lens of who employs them, can you paint the picture for us in 2026?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (03:55):
Imagine there are only 10 physicians in the country for a moment. Six of those physicians are employed by a hospital or health system style organization. Two of those 10 physicians work for or are employed by what we might think of as a corporate owner, a private equity organization, a health plan, something like that. And then the remaining two of the 10 physicians work for an independent physician practice. And work for is doing a lot of work in that last one because you can be employed by an independent practice. So, you might be the shareholder of an independent practice that then employs a whole other host of physicians.

(04:35):
So if we think about there only being 10, it's a 6, 2, 2, split, 6 for health systems, 2 for corporate owners, and 2 for independent practices. And to your point, once upon a time, that two that work for the corporate owners, that didn't used to be a thing.

Rae Woods (04:51):
It wasn't a thing. And then over the last decade, more and more and more physicians have a W-2 relationship with these corporate entities. And for a long time, we actually referred to it as an arms race over physicians. It was who can employ them fast enough? Hospitals were trying to employ them. Anybody who wasn't willing to be employed by a hospital suddenly willing to be employed by one of these corporate owners or take money from private equity, and so on and so forth. But as the financial picture has changed for most players in healthcare in 2026, I'm getting the sense that some are starting to actually contract their physician relationships, at least their W-2 relationships.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (05:36):
There are absolutely places where we are seeing the contraction of the physician workforce. But at the same point in time, we have to ask what is driving that contraction? Sometimes I can't hire for those positions. Right now, if you... Back of the envelope, the numbers, for every two open positions for physicians in this country, there's only one qualified candidate.

Rae Woods (05:58):
Wow.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (05:59):
Some of that contraction that you're describing is movement. Some of that contraction is a lack of supply. And some of that contraction is, "Hey, we are at a point where I'm retiring, I'm leaving, I'm going to a different employer." And so when we look at contraction, contraction needs to be elaborated a little further upon which type are we talking about?

Abby Burns (06:17):
We also see players like Walmart, Walgreens, CVS pulling back on their care delivery strategies. I have to imagine that affects, at some level, the 622 layout that you gave us. But is it rising to the level of statistical significance?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (06:33):
Not yet. The numbers don't say it's reached that point yet.

Rae Woods (06:37):
And for years, Daniel, we've heard from health systems that they actually want to divest some of their physician relationships. In my experience, there was always more talk there than actual action. What is the state of play now?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (06:53):
It's probably somewhere between talk and action. The word I would use is not contraction, but rationalization. There are a lot of health systems out there right now that are looking at the right tool, both clinically and financially, for navigating the situation. Some of them are saying, "We're going to outsource from our own team." I've seen a couple examples of this with anesthesia in particular where, "Hey, we're going to outsource from our own team. We've historically worked with one vendor or had these folks in-house, and it just no longer makes sense from us to do that ourselves. And so, we're going to rationalize that service and use a different vendor or a different partner to fill that gap." We see selective examples of that happening around the country. It's sometimes in sleep, it's sometimes in peds, it's sometimes in anesthesiology. But it's more than talk, but it's less than action. It's a small amount of calibrated moves that fit into the bigger picture of healthcare, which is that idea of rationalization to the right portfolio of services that so many stakeholders are having to take on.

Rae Woods (07:53):
Play the tape forward for us here. We've been running up to and looking down at 2026. What can we expect from consolidation or divestiture activity looking forward?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (08:05):
Sure. I've got a crystal ball.

Abby Burns (08:09):
I was going to ask, can we have expectations? But-

Rae Woods (08:11):
I was more bullish.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (08:11):
I absolutely cannot tell you exactly what's going to happen. I think what I can say though, is a lot of the big headlines have already been made when it comes to acquisitions. Rae made this point earlier. If you wanted to be employed, you have been employed. And there are a lot of older physicians right now that might still be independent that are starting to think about, "What is my off-ramp? What is my potential retirement plan?" And that's causing some creation of like, "Hey, am I going to sell a portion of my practice?" But I don't think anybody can quite clearly and quite confidently tell you, "Hey, we are going to see more acquisition, less acquisition." What I will point out is we did some analysis not too long ago around where we see more or less consolidated specialties, and there are still a significant portion of specialties that have not been as consolidated, that might be right candidates if folks want to make acquisitions.

(09:02):
That said, a lot of people still like being independent, air quotes around "independent" as a terminology. And if that's the case, then those folks might not want to sell or might not need to sell.

Rae Woods (09:12):
Crystal ball aside, our goal for this conversation is that everyone leaves with a deeper appreciation for the state of the provider workforce and the strategic considerations they should be weighing as they project out their own plans to improve patient or member access, to financially stabilize their own business, what have you. What are some of the hallmarks of the provider workforce that we need to talk about in our conversation today?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (09:39):
If I had one word to describe the hallmarks of the provider workforce right now, I would go with tired. If we look at some of the data, burnout has actually quietly gone down for a lot of the physicians and APPs, but at the same point in time as burnout has gone down, so has wellbeing. So we have people who are less burnt out, but their wellbeing may be less high. This is a data point that blows my mind. We asked about a thousand physicians and APPs a year or two ago, were they satisfied with their jobs? And about three out of four said, "Yeah." Yeah, I am actually satisfied with my job." Which, if you talk to a lot of physicians, that would catch you by surprise.

Abby Burns (10:20):
Yeah, I'm pretty surprised.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (10:22):
And even though three out of four were satisfied, something like four out of 10 folks were still thinking about leaving their job.

Rae Woods (10:28):
Wow.

Abby Burns (10:30):
Why?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (10:31):
The idea there, I think, comes down to people are tired. We have seen a massive amount of change in the provider workforce in terms of who it's made up of, how they work. And healthcare is the only industry where the advent of technology didn't actually result in a corresponding increase in productivity. You look at some of the most recent data, productivity has gone down. What do you think happened to compensation, though?

Abby Burns (10:56):
Oh, I bet it went up.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (10:59):
Compensation's going up, but productivity's going down. And so we've got this really interesting moment where, for all of the strategies that health systems, health plans, independent physician groups, the life sciences partners that wants to support these various organizations might be running at, we have a fundamental challenge of a very tired clinical workforce.

Abby Burns (11:17):
A tired but expensive clinical workforce that is increasingly approaching retirement age.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (11:23):
That one is important. The data point that scares me a lot is, essentially, nine out of 10 pulmonologists are over the age of 55. If only we didn't have a recent pulmonary-associated disease that we had never encountered before, that drastically reshaped the world as we know it.

Rae Woods (12:43):
There's another part of the physician workforce that's the elephant in the room that we just need to name, and that is that if you look at any headline, the headline will say that we do not have enough doctors. There's a time in which you and I disagreed with that headline and said, "Sure, if you just look at raw numbers and raw bodies of people, yeah, we're headed for a shortage." But if you do all of this work, if you incorporate more of a care team approach, if you make APPs autonomous, if you deploy technology effectively, then you can still have the supply to match increasingly growing in more complex demand.

(13:20):
Do we still feel that way?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (13:23):
You mean you're giving me an opportunity to revise my statement from 2017?

Rae Woods (13:27):
It's only been a decade.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (13:29):
I think I was pretty bullish and I think we were pretty bullish, and rightly so. That we didn't actually have a shortage of bodies. We had a shortage of time.

Rae Woods (13:37):
Yeah.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (13:37):
The lack of capacity that we had in the workforce was a result of our current care models, our current approaches, our current ways of doing things. And if we were to reallocate time, we would not, in fact, have a shortage. We would probably have a surplus, at least in primary care and likely in other places. That's what I said in 2017. And so you're asking me if I still think that's true. Yeah. I'll offer these two thoughts at once. I think we still have the time problem. Both of you know my favorite Peter Druckerism is there is nothing so useless as making someone more efficient at something they should not be doing in the first place.

(14:14):
Physicians, APPs, RNs, pharmacists, we still have a lot of clinical team members that are doing things that might not be the best use of their time, and that probably means that we don't have, from that lens, the shortage that we expected. I think there's still a lot of opportunity for improvement. However, I would like to amend. I did not have the pandemic on my bingo card in 2017.

Abby Burns (14:38):
You're forgiven for that.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (14:39):
If I had, I would've invested in hand sanitizer. Maybe some other things.

Abby Burns (14:43):
Note for the audience, Daniel goes nowhere without hand sanitizer in his pocket.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (14:49):
It's true. But the fact that 38% of the physician workforce in this country is over the age of 55, the fact that we have not meaningfully transformed how those folks spend their time. And data point I've said earlier, but I'll say it again, if you look at terms of open roles in this country relative to physician bodies able to fill those roles, it's too open and only one body. And I'm looking at that, I'm like, "We might be headed for a shortage." I do think there are some things that could transform that as an answer and push me back into camp one, "We're not going to have a shortage." But I'm looking at these things, and my attitude from nine years ago needs a slight little bit of revision.

Rae Woods (15:29):
Or the market has just changed and it's pushing us further from the reality that we could have sufficient enough providers to deploy against the growing needs in America. My question is, what is pushing us further from sufficiency?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (15:45):
There are several forces driving us away from this. One is how healthcare works if you're a doctor actually practicing. The Physician Foundation usually asks practicing physicians once every two years, "How likely are you to recommend your child to become a doctor?" And at this point in time, one out of two doctors would tell their children, "Don't become a doctor."

Abby Burns (16:05):
Yikes.

Rae Woods (16:05):
Wow.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (16:06):
The people who are currently practicing, when I say they're tired, they're tired. And they are therefore, saying to their children when they answer that question, "Yeah, there might be other or different things to do." So how we practice, I think, is a thing we still have a lot of opportunity to resolve.

(16:24):
There is also the big myth out there that the electronic medical record is the cause of burnout. I think it's actually between four and seven. We actually look at data driving burnout. The EMR doesn't show up until four at the highest, and sometimes as low as seven. What actually shows up is, "I feel like I'm doing too much administrative work. I feel like I don't have enough time to do that work. I feel like I'm not getting respected for that work. I feel like I don't like the platform I'm doing that work in, and I feel like I'm not being paid enough to do that work. And so the compensation piece rears its head frequently.

(16:56):
Rae, we were actually at a roundtable, you and I, not too long ago, and we heard an interesting little tidbit. Somebody said they were trying to hire a physician and the person wanted a full-time salary, but they only wanted to work four days a week. I think that's a perfect, real-world example of the challenge we're looking at from a compensation and burnout perspective. And also, are they having the experience, career-wise, that they thought they were going to have?

Rae Woods (17:19):
I don't think that the leader that shared that example was the only one in the room. There were a lot of nodding heads.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (17:25):
Very many.

Rae Woods (17:26):
So if those are some of the forces that are pushing us further away from having a sufficient physician workforce, or potentially pushing us towards shortage, what about the flip side? What might be bridging that gap?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (17:38):
Can we do acronym soup for a second, Abby?

Abby Burns (17:40):
Let's do it.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (17:41):
I'm going to give you a three-letter acronym and a two-letter acronym.

Abby Burns (17:44):
Oh gosh, it's a test.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (17:45):
First one is APPs.

Abby Burns (17:47):
All right. That one, I've already said today. I feel good about that.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (17:49):
The second one is AI.

Abby Burns (17:52):
All right. Okay. Talk to me through each of these.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (17:55):
So if we start with APPs, I think APPs, we have to look at a little historically. The position that we call APPs today, if you trace it back, actually comes from post World War II, a bunch of folks who had been medics, literally doing battlefield triage in both the European and Asian theaters, come back to the United States. What do you do with these folks? That's when we technically created the language, the position that we now know as physician assistants, and that's where you start saying advanced practice providers. That's the moment the domino falls that creates that position for us.

(18:29):
So if we go all the way back to there and then we fast-forward to where we are now today, there is only one position in healthcare where we have an actually green pipeline, and I feel like I'm leading the witness on this. Which one do you think it is?

Abby Burns (18:41):
It's got to be APPs.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (18:43):
It's APPs. Doctors, the pipeline is not green. Nurses, the pipeline is not green. Pharmacists, the pipeline is not green. There's no cavalry coming in these positions. Medical assistants, the pipeline is not green. And APPs, when it comes to nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurse anesthetists, the pipeline is actually green. And what's wild, and I don't think it's reflected upon enough, is there's a strong argument to be made that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, one of the things that states did was they opened up the scope of practice laws of advanced practice providers. So you could be in a hospital, you could be doing a whole host of things clinically that APPs in certain states and geographies had not been allowed to do previously, and someone could make a very clear argument that it was the APP workforce stepping up the way that they did that might've caused us to have fewer lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, because we suddenly had an influx of clinical capacity that we were not counting on because those folks stepped up and scope of practice was changed.

Rae Woods (19:42):
Yeah. Daniel, you and I went from a world in which we were defending the idea that APPs could or should be deployed autonomously. And all of the sudden, the conversation shifted. Perhaps, not everywhere. And I think you would say that there are still a lot of variable deployment of APPs across specialties, departments, certainly across regions, but the conversation certainly changed.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (20:05):
The conversation definitely changed. I will say, that there are some places where scope of practice laws are particularly restrictive. So you look at certain states that might be what we would think of as more conservative in their scope of practice laws, and APPs there still have a very limited scope of practice, limited bandwidth of what they can do clinically on their own. But then you look at places, Midwest, more rural geographies, there are APPs out there managing their own primary care panel with the support of a physician who might be in the clinic but might be elsewhere and they're deployed autonomously. There are a ton of things APPs are also doing in various specialties all around the country, but it's not a universal everybody is bought in on APPs. There are still some places where the scope of practice is very restrictive. However, the thing I tell leaders of medical groups, leaders of health systems, all the time is, "We are getting to the point where your APP model is going to be synonymous with the strategy being successful or not."

Rae Woods (21:00):
How does that land?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (21:03):
I think a lot of people agree with it, but they still want to hire more physicians. The fundamental truth is we are rapidly approaching a time where APPs outnumber physicians in the workforce. And any organization that is not finding a way to successfully incorporate, train, deploy APPs, you're leaving a humongous source of clinical capacity untapped, and I'm not saying that APPs are doctors. I want to be very clear about that. I'm not a clinician myself.

(21:33):
But what I am saying is that there's a lot that APPs can do and they can do even more now than they could 10 years ago, both legally and from a training perspective. And if we don't figure out how to integrate these resources into our care models, we're definitely going to have a shortage.

Abby Burns (21:49):
What are the forces that are imposing those scope of practice limitations?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (21:55):
There's two. There's a regulatory component, which is big, national, or state level, and then there's an organizational component, and that is how do organizations deploy their APPs or what is their model that sets it up. So, it's two different flavors.

Abby Burns (22:11):
On the regulatory side, this is where I'm guessing a lot of that geographic variability comes into play. Oversimplification is fine, but can you lay out the flavors of what that looks like?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (22:23):
I can think of a couple of things. One of them that comes to mind is following 2020 and everything associated with it, several states made the choice or put into their state legislatures an effort to improve or free up the scope of practice associated with APPs. Some states were very like, "Yes, absolutely. We'll take more clinician capacity." Other states were much more restrictive. If you look at New York, I think there were 15 different bills that were essentially related to APP scope of practice were proposed. They were not passed. They were overturned. So, the scope of practice remains very restrictive in that geography. Let's also be very real. If you go into New York City, you've got five different academic medical centers. So there's some local things that need to be accounted for, but that is an example of the regulatory level of restriction.

(23:12):
Another regulatory restriction that comes to mind is around professional status for APPs from a education perspective. And essentially, the way the degree is treated right now means that you can get less student loans or less student loan forgiveness than you could from a physician professional degree, for example. And so, there is definitely a regulatory component to how are we, across the country, making it possible for folks to become APPs. But that's only one side of the coin.

Abby Burns (23:41):
Yeah. I was going to say the other thing you laid out was the care model of it all. How are we actually deploying APPs? Similar question to painting variability, but I'm wondering if you can give us a maturity curve of how health systems and medical groups across the country are currently deploying APPs.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (23:58):
I'm going to give it in the context of best practice versus maybe not. So if you ask most health system leaders what's the biggest challenge they run into with APPs, biggest one is they often leave after two years. That's a data point we should come back to for why that is relevant. The second-biggest one is when we hire them, they're not fully trained. That's another data point. I want to offer both of those data points as I now give you the answer to your question.

(24:25):
Option one is, sure, I hire an APP and I put them in my call center, and that APP is just answering phone calls. That's not a terrible usage of an APP, but there's a lot more that person could be doing. They might be interested in it, but that should not be the default model for how you leverage an APP.

Rae Woods (24:42):
Using them under a TOPA license.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (24:44):
Correct. You can use an RN, or a medical assistant, or an LPN to do a lot of that same functionality, and you're using an APP to do that functionality. If that's maturity level one, maturity level two might be, okay, we're going to hire an APP and we are going to give them to a physician whose practice needs additional capacity. We're going to say, Hey, you've doctor, you APP, figure this out.

(25:05):
What's wrong with that? Well, what happens if that APP is not fully trained? They're going to be trained for the remainder of the time just by that doctor. They may never grow to be all that they're capable of, and that doctor may use them only in use cases that doctor thinks about, rather than as a systematized, more constructive approach to overall usage of an APP. So, that's maybe level two. If you're using them, you're using them in a practice or in a hospital or in a setting that is clinical and they're making a difference, but it's highly variable, it's subject to the whims of the doctor, and you're not really taking full advantage of the model.

Abby Burns (25:39):
And just to make this clear to our listeners, these are not the most effective use cases for deploying APPs when we're talking about a level one or two in maturity.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (25:47):
Where the most effective example, and we've got great research on this from over the years, and it turns out that there's time and time again, you look at what makes for a good APP model, it comes pretty consistently back to some of the same things. First of all, do we actually have a model where we are deploying these folks intentionally? Intentionally and, dare I say, autonomously, if your state's scope of practice allows. So, there is an example. You could have that APP running a small primary care practice on their own in certain states in the Midwest, and they are deployed autonomously as a PCP. You can go have an APP act as not as a physician extender, but almost like as a physician specialist.

(26:26):
So, GI is a great example of this where you have... I'm a gastroenterologist, but a member of my practice is an APP who specializes in IBD, and that person sees all of my practice's IBD patients. Or if I'm a surgical specialist, my patient, my APP might see all of my pres or all of my post surgeries to manage that. So you actually have a clear intentional deployment model paired with a good approach to training, onboarding, evaluating, and compensating. And that's what a really progressive, really effective level... If we did 1, 2, 3, that's what level three looks like for intentional, successful, consistent APP deployment.

Abby Burns (27:07):
I want to bring us back to the two data points or anecdotes you started with, which is that a lot of APPs leave after two years, and training may be the single biggest differentiator. In that level three maturity, I'm hearing solves for both of those.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (27:20):
That is absolutely correct. And you can imagine level two, right? Give a physician an APP as a resource in their practice and they're paired up with that physician. Sometimes, that might work amazingly. The doctor trains that APP and they take on a whole host, and they become that level three just by proxy for how they work with that physician. And then other times, remember, people are tired. We may not have the intentionality. A physician may not be positioned best to do that training. And so two years into that journey, they're like, "I'm not getting training. I'm acting more like a medical assistant than an autonomous provider. I'm going to go elsewhere." And that's why I think the more organizations can be intentional about their APP model, the more likely they are to retain their APPs, to attract high-quality APPs, and also bringing it back to that shortage concept to have APPs that are able to manage their own panels and to extend the supply of our provider workforce.

Rae Woods (28:19):
Daniel, you've Shared such rich detail with us because you are a researcher first. But you're also a vice president and national spokesperson with Advisory Board, which means you spend a lot of your time traveling the country, meeting with executive teams, meeting with physician leaders, specifically to push on both the opportunities that they can chase and the strategic risks they should avoid.

(28:41):
What are you telling teams in 2026 and planning to tell them in 2027 in terms of how they should be thinking about their physician and their APP workforce?

Daniel Kuzmanovich (28:51):
The first thing I think that everybody should realize here, what have you, is the workforce is tired, and we've seen this time and time again. A-plus strategy with C-level execution does not usually result in the things that we need. And right now, if we are trying to drive meaningful change and improve some of the challenges in healthcare, we've got to account for the state that the workforce is in because they're the ones who are actually going to be who executes the things that we're talking about doing. So the workforce is tired, know this, be aware of this, factor this into the decisions we are making. That's thing one, I would say.

(29:25):
Thing two, I would say, get, and I cannot stress this enough, your APP model right. If there is one place where we actually see a supply of bodies coming into healthcare, and not just, "Hey, I'm interested in healthcare," but folks who have been working in healthcare for a long period of time, this is it. These folks, many of them are already here. And if we use them the way that they're capable of being used, we can solve a lot of challenges in American healthcare.

(29:51):
And if we use APPs drastically below license and we increasingly limit them or put them in boxes that they're not designed to fit in, we're leaving some resources in the table. And I can just hear somebody saying, "Yes, but there are a lot of limitations." It's like, yes, let's solve for those limitations rather than just saying that there are limitations and trying to find a different solution such as hiring another physician. There aren't enough physicians coming.

Rae Woods (30:12):
Or they might be thinking the solution there is those two letters that you brought up earlier in this conversation, artificial intelligence.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (30:19):
We have practically terraformed American healthcare for AI to make a difference. AI has the ability to expand our access, to reduce some of our administrative burden, to create greater degrees of personalization of care. But does anybody remember the last time we did a meaningful, big transition of healthcare to a new technology, and we adopted this whole new technology and how smoothly it went? I do. The electronic medical record was not always everybody's favorite transition to go through. And so, the number one thing I would say is yes, let's leverage AI. We have done so much to create opportunity for it in healthcare, but putting AI on top of a bad workflow is just like putting an EMR on top of a bad workflow. It's just going to give us a worse result rather than actually solving the challenges we need.

Rae Woods (31:16):
Daniel, thanks so much for coming back on Radio Advisory.

Daniel Kuzmanovich (31:19):
Thank you for having me and talk about one of my favorite subjects.

Abby Burns (31:26):
When we talk about the future of healthcare, there's a lot of conversation about what could transform this business, the tech, the tools, what could change about the regulation, the infrastructure around us, and so on and so forth. But we can't lose sight of who will transform healthcare, which is the people. It's the physicians, the nurses, the clinicians, the APPs. Don't lose sight of them as you navigate your organizations forward. And remember, as always, we are here to help.

(32:24):
New episodes drop every Tuesday.

Rae Woods (32:27):
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This episode was produced by me, Rae Woods, as well as Abby Burns, Chloe Bakst, and Atticus Raasch. The episode was edited by Katy Anderson with technical support provided by Dan Tayag, Chris Phelps, and Joe Shrum. Additional support was provided by Dominique Del Gaudio. Special thanks to Sarah Roller and Eliza Dailey. We'll see you next week.