Here's a question worth sitting with: What business are you actually in?

If your answer is “healthcare,” you might be leaving your most defensible advantage on the table. The independent practices pulling away from the pack have landed on a different answer — they're in the hospitality business, and they're using technology to make sure every minute of staff time goes toward proving it.

The fear about AI in healthcare is that it's coming for your staff. Eric deRegt's take is that the real threat is quieter — and the opportunity is bigger.

The constraint on independent practices isn't a surplus of people — it's a shortage, made worse by administrative bloat that has buried the human side of care. The move isn't to replace your team. It's to free them.

Strip away the paperwork and what's left is hospitality: how a patient feels from the first call to the last goodbye. For Indie's best-performing customers, the one-on-one relationship patients feel with the staff is the differentiator — not a nice-to-have.

Scale and standardization across locations has backoffice benefits. But hospitality is the opposite of standardization, and authentic local relationships can't be manufactured across hundreds of locations. 

Hand the repetitive, judgment-light work — document processing first, voice agents for overflow — to technology that augments rather than replaces. Then put the recovered capacity back into the patient relationships that set you apart.

A breakdown of what in the name of AI you should actually be paying attention to: AI-native healthcare and the human-agent workforce

“AI-native healthcare” may sound impressive, but the key takeaway is clear: AI works best with clean, connected, and usable data. Winning companies won’t just add agents to chaotic systems. They’ll redesign workflows so humans and AI can collaborate safely and effectively.

Verdict: ✅ Worth paying attention to

Most independent practices underestimate how much revenue slips through the cracks each week.

Missed calls during peak hours. Patients who hang up after being placed on hold. Referrals that never make it into the schedule.

These small breakdowns add up quickly.

We built a simple tool to help you understand what this might be costing your practice.

The Revenue Leakage Calculator takes your practice size, average patient value, and call volume, then estimates how much revenue may be lost due to front desk inefficiencies.

It takes about two minutes. No email required. Just practical data you can use to decide whether it's worth tightening up your front desk workflows.

Thanks for joining us for another edition of Practice Independence — we’ll see you next week!

PS: We bring together independent practice owners for off-the-record conversations about what's actually working. Small rooms. Real talk. Reply to this email if you’re interested in attending or hosting a dinner near you.

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