On/Offcall: Physicians Learn to Build Your Dream AI Tools in Just Minutes

Offcall Team

Welcome back to On/Offcall!

It’s time for Session #3 of our AI Residency Webinar Series, and this one gets hands-on!

👉 What if you could build a prior auth letter generator in 45 minutes, no coding required?
👉 What if Claude could build a simple fix to your workflow that saves 20 minutes of your day?
👉 What if "I don't know how to code" is no longer the barrier it seems?

From your hosts Dr. Michael Hobbs and Dr. Graham Walker, this session teaches you how to build simple AI tools in no time – zero terminal or coding experience required.

But that’s not all: This time, we also want to feature you! Throughout the webinar, we’ll showcase projects from other clinicians as a way to help inspire others to get started. Are you a physician who has vibe coded a tool recently? Or do you know someone who has? Tag yourself (or your builder colleagues) in the comments with a few words about what you built. You can also reply directly to this newsletter (Michael and Graham read every message).

We’ll feature you and showcase your creative projects in front of a live audience of the Offcall community!

Don’t miss it! Save your spot for June 10th.

A huge thank you to our sponsors Evidently and Heidi for supporting this series and helping us bring practical AI education to clinicians.

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On/Offcall is the weekly dose of information and inspiration that every physician needs.

Get Featured in Office Hours With Abridge

This week, we shared an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Abridge's new clinical decision support experience! We're thrilled that Matt Troup, Clinical Strategy Principal at Abridge, invited Dr. Graham Walker and the Offcall community for an inside early look at some of the key features:

👉 Clinical decision support embedded directly in the conversation, not a separate search
👉 Seamless access across mobile and desktop
👉 Evidence from NEJM, JAMA, UpToDate, and more, shaped by the patient in front of you

We're making this the topic of Graham’s next Office Hours and Matt will be joining live to answer your questions. What question do you have for Graham and Matt about Abridge’s take on clinical decision support? Or about generative AI and physicians more broadly?

Drop your questions in the comments or reply directly and we’ll feature you.

But That’s Not All: RSVP to Abridge’s First Ever Keynote

On June 11, Abridge will be hosting its first-ever Keynote, live from New York City and streaming for the Offcall community. Abridge was built to remove the barriers between clinicians and their patients. Livestream this Keynote presentation to be the first to learn about the most significant step toward that goal to date. It's all coming together.

Register here

“Now Is Not the Time for Silence”

This week, we featured one of the most powerful physicians in the country on How I Doctor, AMA CEO Dr. John Whythe. Dr. Whyte is 10 months into leading the oldest and largest physician organization in the U.S. From prior authorization and scope creep to AI governance and physician burnout, his conversation with Graham tackles the forces reshaping medicine in real time.

Dr. Whyte is candid about the AMA’s challenges and direct about one thing: The physicians who shape the future of medicine will be the ones who engage now rather than wait it out. They dive into:

✨ Why burnout is still a system-wide emergency, even if the numbers have improved
✨ How AI efficiency gains are often being turned into more patient volume
✨ Why doctors account for only a small fraction of healthcare spending yet absorb so much of the blame
✨ What the AMA is doing around prior authorization, scope creep, and AI oversight
✨ Why physicians need to lead the conversation around AI instead of resisting it
✨ And why silence right now means allowing other people to decide the future of medicine for us

Listen to the episode here

Most Talked About On Offcall

Here are the top voices shaping AI in healthcare right now
ICYMI, see the incredible clinicians featured on our list: Part 1 and Part 2 here.

What Your Relationship With AI Will Actually Look Like in Three Years: Relationship, Oversight, and Workflow Mapped Out
From Dr. Neil Panchal After spending the last several years working with AI systems, here's what I actually expect the working day of a physician to look like three years from now, mapped across three dimensions.

6 Key Takeaways From Graham’s Interview With Dr. Rana Awdish

She wrote the book In Shock that changed how doctors practice medicine. Here are the top takeaways from her How I Doctor podcast conversation.

2025 PHYSICIANS AI REPORT

Access the Complete Report

✓Complete quantitative breakdown of what physicians really think about AI

✓Strategic implications for healthcare organizations and AI companies

✓Sentiment analysis of physician attitudes about AI and the future

Download full report

Best Things to Read This Week

National Analysis of Trends and Factors Associated with Surgeon Attrition in the U.S. (Journal of the American College of Surgeons)
From Abdulaziz Elemosho, Odysseas Chatzipanagiotou, Meher Angez, Jeffrey Janis, and Timothy Pawlik: Among 224,629 surgeons 15,753 exited active practice over a median 8 years, yielding cumulative attrition of 9.7%.

Why Have All the Doctors Gone? Insights Into Early Clinical Departure Among Physicians in the United States (The Permanente Journal, h/t Graham)
From Sea Chen, Lindsey Carlasare, Roger Brown, Michael Tutty: A new national survey of clinically inactive physicians was conducted to identify the factors driving early exit from the clinical physician workforce.

How The ARISE Network Is Rethinking Clinical AI (Forbes)
From Dr. Spencer Dorn: Spanning multiple medical centers and led by physicians at Harvard and Stanford with diverse and complementary backgrounds, ARISE is trying to understand what AI systems can do in medicine and how we can evaluate and explain their performance. Featuring Jonathan Chen, Ethan Goh, and Adam Rodman.

Female Doctors Are Quitting Medicine. What’s Driving Them Away? (Boston Globe, h/t Dana Levinson)
Women are significantly more likely to leave the practice of medicine than men, here’s why, featuring recent research and commentary by Lisa Rotenstein.

Physician Spotlight: Meet Dr. Christie Mulholland

Have a response for Dr. Mulholland? Reply to this post directly, she’ll personally read every message. Also, let us know who we should feature next by replying to this post!

1. Christie, what’s one task you’ve fully handed off to AI that you’d never take back? I have fully handed off the first draft of PowerPoint slides, and I’ll never do one again. I make a lot of presentations for grand rounds, faculty workshops, and leadership meetings. Looking at a blank slide deck is firmly in my past. Now I give AI my topic outline (from my brain) and the template. I still revise and refine, but I never have to start from zero.

I also frequently use AI for editing my writing, although I get the writing far enough along that I can feel solidly that the ideas come from me and that I’m the primary author. I resisted mentioning this in my answer, because it feels taboo. Some academic publications won’t even accept an article where AI has been used in any capacity.

I find it kind of ironic that our profession is embracing AI in clinical settings, but not for expressing our own ideas or advancing ourselves professionally. I wonder about what’s behind that. Are we more accepting of using every advantage when it benefits others (patients and, even more so, our employers) than when it empowers us?

2. Will AI solve the physician shortage or quietly make it worse? Both are possible. The outcome will depend on how much say physicians have in how AI gets deployed.

Take geographic maldistribution of physicians as an example driver of physician shortages. Telemedicine plus AI could genuinely extend physician reach into rural and underserved areas in ways that matter. But the same technology could also be used to justify never recruiting physicians to those communities in the first place. Whether it becomes access or substitution depends entirely on who’s making the decision.

The burnout piece worries me more. Ambient AI documentation is being touted for its potential to reduce burnout, borne out in early studies. But health systems are already looking for the ROI. How will they pay for the products? The downstream risk is that any physician time saved will be seen as additional patient slots and revenue. We’ve seen this movie before with the rollout of the EHRs. They were supposed to give us more time with patients. Instead, they became a billing engine and created administrative bloat, which is arguably the largest driver of burnout. If AI follows the same pattern, we’ll have reduced documentation burden only to find ourselves expected to see forty patients a day instead of thirty. The fear I hear most from many colleagues is that AI plus expanded midlevel scope will be a deliberate cost-cutting strategy to “reduce the need” for physicians.

The physicians who will shape this outcome are the ones with enough agency to stay at the table and push back.

3. What’s something you used to judge other physicians for that you now completely understand? Stepping back. When I saw colleagues taking a leave or going part-time, I didn’t judge them harshly, but I assumed I wouldn’t become one of them. I thought that loving my work and finding deep meaning in it would be enough to sustain me indefinitely.

Then it wasn’t.

I was a role model of well-being for years, with a formal title as a well-being director. Then, it happened all at once. My institution, facing financial pressure, mandated that all clinical faculty increase patient volume, right as I’d been working hard to reduce burden on those same faculty. It felt like a rug pull. Around that same time, I did a peer-to-peer call with an insurance company trying to get a dying patient approved for inpatient hospice. The response of the faceless “peer” insurance company doctor was, “Wow, she didn’t die yet?” Revealing his hand—he’d been waiting her out.

That was the moment. Not burnout exactly — I still cared deeply. It was demoralization. The sense that caring no longer felt worth it inside the system I was in. I applied for a formal sabbatical. When it was denied, I took one anyway. But the sabbatical wasn’t giving up. I still care, and now I’ve repositioned myself just enough that I can stay in the fight.

4. If you had a magic wand for one thing in medicine — not your whole career, just one thing — what would you fix tomorrow? I’d normalize rest. Actually normalize it, not as a talking point at a well-being conference, but structurally. Sabbaticals. Career breaks. Part-time schedules. Taking 30 minutes per patient instead of 20, even if it means earning a little less.

Right now, the physician who steps back, for any reason, is treated like she’s opting out. She becomes invisible. And most physicians accept this without pushback, because they’ve internalized that any boundary they draw comes at a patient’s expense. That guilt is real. It’s also exploited by institutions that depend on physicians absorbing whatever the system can’t handle.

Here’s what I think gets missed: physicians who have space to breathe are also the ones who can think clearly about what’s wrong and what to do about it. Rest isn’t retreat. It’s how you stay in the fight. The doctors who took a step back and moved forward on their own terms are some of the most clear-eyed advocates I know for fixing this system.

We’re losing physicians not just to burnout but to a creeping sense that there’s no version of this career that’s sustainable for them. More flexibility, real flexibility, not performative, would keep more doctors in the profession. And frankly, we need them here.

Read the full-length version here. Know someone else who should be featured? Reply or tag them and their company in the comments!

Highlights From Our Community

Each week, we celebrate career milestones, launches, & other goings-on in the physician community. Have something to promote? Reply and we’ll feature you.

Exciting news, Warner Thomas
Sutter Health President and CEO Warner Thomas announced the launch of Mark & Mary Stevens School of Medicine, a collaboration between Sutter Health and Santa Clara University to help prepare the next generation of physicians to lead a new era of medicine. Read more here.

Thanks for speaking up, Saravanan Kasthuri
Dr. Saravanan Kasthuri was featured on the KevinMD podcast discussing why the physician fee schedule has been quietly subsidizing the hospital outpatient fee schedule for decades. As a result, the lowest-cost site of service has been starved. Listen and learn more here.

Career news, Jamal Ross
Dr. Jamal Ross began a new role as Chief Medical Officer at FRIEND HEALTH - HRDI, working to improve access to high-quality care on the South Side of Chicago. Learn more here.

Congratulations Oliver Overheu
Dr. Oliver Overheu graduated with an MBA from Duke University - The Fuqua School of Business and a certificate in Health Sector Management. Congratulate him here.

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