The Practices That Won't Exist in 5 Years and the Ones that Will

Introduction

Cameron Hemphill: Welcome to Medical Millionaire, where medical aesthetics meets business growth. Hosted by Cameron Hemphill, entrepreneur, investor, and one of the industry's most respected voices. As founder of Growth99, strategic advisor to Terri Ross Consulting, and advisor to Bridgeline Medical, Cameron helps owners go beyond revenue to build real enterprise value. This podcast is for med spa owners and wellness entrepreneurs ready to think bigger, execute smarter, and build a business that actually scales.

Cameron: Hey, what's up, everybody? Cam Hemphill here, your host of the Medical Millionaire podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. My goal is to give incredible value and insight for practice owners. If you're looking to start a practice, grow, scale, or sell, every single episode we put together is there to help you elevate, to help you become the best practice owner you can be. I want you to become CEOs. I want you to run your practice like a business. I've been on a tear lately with interviews from tech founders, product engineers, practice owners, top 100 providers, and I'm having a tremendous amount of fun.

Welcoming Jason Brand of Podium

Cameron: And guys, I have such a cool guest on the show. This gentleman is deep in the woods with tech, deep in the woods with AI, and he's serving hundreds, if not thousands, of providers and practices on their tech. I'm so happy to welcome Jason Brand to the show. He's with Podium. They're doing incredible things, and they've been on this massive AI journey lately. I thought it was the perfect time to have him on to talk about everything they're doing. So Jason, thanks so much. I know you're busy.

Jason Brand: Thanks. I'm excited to be here.

Cameron: Yeah, man. So let's jump right in. You guys are in Salt Lake City — there's obviously something in the water there. Tell us more about Podium. I think most of the audience probably knows about Podium, but maybe some people don't. You guys are obviously consistently innovating very quickly. Give us an idea: who is Podium? What are you guys doing? How long have you been there?

Building an AI-native EMR

Jason: Yeah, yeah. I've been at Podium for about a decade, working on communication tools and ways we can streamline that for practices. As of about three years ago, we really dove headfirst into how we embed AI in this communication platform, really thinking about a future where agents are handling communication on behalf of businesses in a way that provides a lot of value for both the business and the consumers — you want to work with a business that's responsive, that has all the right answers when you ask. The way that's evolved over the last 18 months is, in order for those AI agents to be the very best they can be — basically your best employee, available 24/7 — they need access to all the tools your employees have: your schedule, your clinical workflows, your payment workflows. So about 18 months ago we set out to go straight into that. In some ways we joked that we didn't really want to build an EMR, but we did, because we knew that having it all in one place would not only provide immense value for practices that increasingly find themselves spread across many tools, but also let us continue to build AI agents that are highly capable and able to take on a lot of the operational coordination work that can be really tedious and get in the way of what practices do best.

Cameron: Jason, you're head of product at Podium. You've been there a long time. You're touching the AI core, the mechanics of it — getting intelligence from your account executives, from customer success, from the people on the ground talking to practice owners. You guys are doing a really great job absorbing that information, you clearly have great processes internally, and you take it back to the product team. I don't think I've seen a company at your size be so innovative and move so fast. I have to say, I'm blown away by how quickly you're moving and making decisions. This isn't a startup — Podium is a big company — but it has to be a fun environment to work in. I come from a tech and CRM background, and I love it. So shout-out to you and your team for everything you're doing.

Cameron: And for the listeners — look, there's a shift taking place over the next five years. If you're not thinking about what your practice is going to look like, it's time. AI is here, it's here to stay, it's here to help you. If you don't embrace it, it's probably going to make a massive dent in your practice, and we want to avoid that. My thesis is that over the next five years, there are going to be practices that scale aggressively, increase enterprise value, dominate patient acquisition, and build a massive, operationally leveraged ecosystem. Because everything's fragmented right now — it's been a fragmented market for so long, and as practice owners we're tired of it. How do you get true, clean data all the way out to reporting on the health of the practice? There's nowhere to go. I think the practices that don't inject AI into their operating system are going to slowly disappear. Not because they weren't great injectors, not because they didn't care about patients, but because they failed to adapt to innovation around AI, automation, and communication systems, and to deliver the kind of patient experience modern consumers expect at the highest level.

What makes AI genuinely agentic

Cameron: So talk to us more, Jason, about AI. We hear the term thrown around on a pretty broad level — what is agentic AI? What are you guys truly doing inside your system to help the practice owner and deliver a great patient experience?

Jason: Yeah, yeah. A lot of it is boots on the ground, like you said — we're spending time across the business, my team is in person or on calls with customers every day. So it's really understanding deeply what's working well and what isn't so we can fix it, and also understanding the workflows of a modern practice and where the opportunities are for us to do more with technology that's rapidly evolving. We're seeing new things every week and thinking about how we can better leverage this and get it implemented in a way that drives success for businesses — helps them grow, make more money, and compete in a challenging market.

Jason: I think what makes a real AI agent — if I'm shopping around, I want to understand: is this a rule-based automation, or a quick generated message similar to what you'd get from ChatGPT, or is this an agent that can really act autonomously and make decisions based on a whole bunch of context and rules that are unique to my business? In the market, you see cases where a platform has ten different AI modules with AI slapped on them, and that can be very different from an agent that uses what's available to it the same way your best employee would, and can go get work done for you and drive impact for your business.

Jason: As we spend time with customers, we learn that every practice is a little different, so how this gets customized for a business is something we take very seriously. We have thousands of unique agents deployed, each with a different set of instructions. As a business, you get in there and understand how you want it to behave differently around discussions of certain services, or recommendations for certain types of patients. You see the instructions, you see the success of the different pathways someone takes through those instructions, and the outcomes you want it driving. It's really exciting for us to give businesses these tools and think about how they can continue to grow in the way they operate for their business.

From ChatGPT to agentic AI in aesthetics

Cameron: It's moving so fast. If I rolled back the clock three years, I wasn't using ChatGPT, which I think is the most basic AI tool out there today — you could use it as a search engine, a quick prompt to write a text or an email or a caption for social. It's quite powerful; they're IPOing pretty soon and the valuation is obviously high. They have a massive user base and people use it. I think Claude has taken a tremendous amount of market share right now. I think you see a lot of people migrating to that. But I could go down that whole road. I think when people talk about AI, my sense is the practice owner is still looking at it very confused. "Well, I use AI, sure — we use ChatGPT and it makes a caption for social media. Maybe we use another tool to create content, and Chat just rolled out this cool little image thing I see all over social media." But you guys are creating agentic AI — true intelligence that goes into the EMR and extracts information you can use to market to your patient base. I thought that was absolutely fascinating — things like helping with lead conversion, communication consistency, or follow-up systems.

Cameron: So from your perspective, what's the biggest difference between practices that are growing rapidly? I see practices still seeing 50% year-over-year growth, 100% year-over-year growth depending on where they are in the lifecycle — 20%, 30% is obviously very healthy for a practice that's been around a while. From your perspective, between the ones scaling rapidly and the ones plateauing — is it a systems problem? What is it, from a head-of-product mindset?

What separates scaling practices from plateauing ones

Jason: Yeah, I like to put myself in the shoes of the people running the business, and the patients on the other side. I think those who are able to grow really quickly are ultra-responsive — to inbound leads, to inquiries, to people trying to get a hold of them for various issues — and they have great ways to follow up and make sure no one's falling between the cracks. Whether it's a new lead they got busy over the weekend and never responded to, and are they following up the next week? Or an existing patient they haven't seen in a while but know ought to be coming in, and are they reaching back out, re-engaging? All of that can be done manually, but it's a lot of work and a lot of tracking — you need great employees staying on top of it. I think that's why the practices doing best are using AI-assisted tools to do that for them, just because of the sheer amount of work it takes to provide the experience people expect. We live in a world where everything is ultra-responsive and tailored to us as consumers — I can get Amazon to drop something on my porch the same day or the next morning. If I'm not catered to, whether intentional or not, I lose track of things and forget them. I think playing to that is probably the biggest differentiator I'm seeing.

Reclaiming the practice owner's most valuable resource: time

Cameron: Yeah, I like that. When you look at it from a practice owner's or provider's lens, at the end of the day they sell time, and sometimes they don't even realize that. You have to educate them — like, you're selling time, and you walk through this formula with them. How many treatment rooms do you have? Okay, five. How many hours are in the day? Eight. Five times eight is forty. So how much time are you actually selling? What's your utilization rate? How much time are you spending on your systems? If you, the most expensive person in the practice, are spending time on your systems, you should want your system to work for you instead of you working the system. If a practice owner is always trying to fire themselves from their administrative duties, they start to realize, "I shouldn't be duplicating data entry into multiple systems, pulling a report from a third-party system, waiting on my fractional CFO to give me that report so I can put it into this other report." Now I have a wellness line, so I need another EMR — I've seen tech stack fragmentation you wouldn't believe. And then they just throw bodies at it. Look, I'm a big fan of human beings, but I'm a bigger fan of deploying tools when they buy your time back.

Cameron: So just to build on that for practice owners: that's how you should be thinking — how many hours do I have to sell? That should be your number one priority. If you're using those hours to manually maintain a system, really think about that administrative work and how you can delegate it to an operating system that uses AI.

Cameron: So let's shift gears. I think anybody can take AI and, from a marketing standpoint, throw it on a landing page, write some copy, spin it up through some platform with a hosted system, and maybe a lead comes in through a form. You guys are taking it much further. Can you walk us through the whole experience of what a practice owner would feel using a product like yours, from an EMR standpoint?

Inside the AI Studio: playbooks and Avery, Podium's AI agent

Jason: Yeah, yeah. It starts with making sure the EMR is set up correctly, because the AI is only as good as — think of your best employee working on a system the way you described. They can be all over it, or you can have someone full-time optimizing it. Once we get past that, this AI has a set of instructions. We work really closely with a practice owner to get that set up as they onboard and understand their preferences — here's what we recommend, but where do you need adjustments? And we do testing with them, back and forth.

Jason: What's really awesome, and I alluded to this earlier, is we have a tool we call the Studio, where I can go in and see the playbook for booking a new appointment, the one for rebooking, the one for handling cancellations, and so on for whatever the workflows are. In some ways it's like the manual you'd give a new employee on day one — this is how we do this process. You can see what the goal of the process is, how we think about success for it, what information you need to make good decisions, and so on. We've got defaults that come out of the box based on our experience working with thousands of practices, but where the business takes it from there is totally up to them.

Jason: So what that turns into is: new leads come in, and the AI agent — we call her Avery, you can rename her for your business — is using those instructions, having that conversation, and getting people on the calendar. When someone follows up and says they need to cancel, Avery knows your cancellation policy, how to handle it, and can have that conversation — whether a deposit can move, or a cancellation fee applies because it's inside 48 hours, whatever rules you have in place. It really gives you that time back to focus on the hours in the day you have to provide care and services to your patients. That's a lot of how this might look for some of the key workflows. We also have people define the points where they want to be looped in as a human, or loop in a particular person on their team — somebody asking about this, somebody getting frustrated about that — pull me in so I can be part of the conversation and help.

Training Avery like a new employee

Cameron: Yeah, I love that you break it down like that. It's got all this horsepower — it has a name, it can help convert, it can help rebook, it can train, it's got a playbook, protocols, all this stuff. I think one question practice owners have — I have it too — is, I think it's almost like you could have the best AI agent out there, but how do you train the AI agent? Because it doesn't just come out of the box ready for XYZ Med Spa — your language, your policies. What is that? How do you feed it? How does it get trained so it can become the employee you're describing?

Jason: Right, right. The advantage is, when it's working well, it's unlike an employee — you give it the instruction once, and it's going to handle it that way every time. Generally we're talking about some investment up front — we'll spend a few hours making sure we get the really important things configured right from the get-go, the things that are generally distinct between practices. From there, it's really about — generally in the first couple of weeks, people are watching closely what the AI is doing, and there are really easy ways in the product to share feedback, the same way you'd give feedback to an employee: "Hey, next time don't say it this way, this is how we do things here," or "It looks like you don't know our policy for this — update your memory." The neat thing is, when you give that kind of feedback, it comes back and says, "Great, here's the playbook we have for how we do bookings — I'm going to make this change based on what you told me, and here's how I'd handle this conversation next time." And you look at that and say, "Yeah, that looks great, let's go," or "That's not quite there, let's work on this a little more." It's almost a separate agent you're working with to perform surgery on your customer-facing agent to make sure it's working the way you expect. So there's some initial investment up front to get set up, and then you're keeping an eye on it and building trust, until you're at the point where the agent pulls you in when it needs you, but otherwise it's humming along, and you're not checking it at night or on the weekend — you know it's jumping in and handling things as they come in.

Why implementation and training determine success

Cameron: I love that you said that, because here's where I see the disconnect — not even specific to aesthetics, AI in general, voice agents, text agents in general: people try it and go, "Ah, it didn't really work, it sounded kind of funny on the phone, let's ditch it, it's not going to work." I think the mindset needs to be: hold on, train it. It has to be trained just like an employee. You can't bring Susan, the front desk person, in for a day, not train her, not give her any direction, just put her in the seat and say, "have at it." That's a big disconnect in the market. And really, even outside of aesthetics — if you were to buy a piece of software, I don't know, call it Salesforce, call it ClickUp, whatever SaaS product is out there, you can buy it, but you have to implement it, and then you have to train your team on how to use it. It doesn't just work the moment it's out of the box.

Cameron: I'll give you another example, off the cuff, outside of tech. My daughter wanted a new bike recently — apparently the e-bike scene around here is out of control, Jason. Everybody's got little motorcycles.

Jason: Exactly. Dude, it's wild in the neighborhood.

Cameron: But they graduated, and it was kind of their little present, and I got them bikes. These things showed up in boxes — I had to build the damn thing. It didn't show up ready to use and let her just go rip it. We had to build it, then we had to have a talk about it, put the safety helmet on, make sure the bolts were tight, and then we built up to, "okay, maybe in a few weeks you can try a wheelie," but you're not doing a wheelie out of the box. That just came to me, it was a recent thing with my daughter, but that's how people need to look at AI — it doesn't come out of the box ready to use. But when you implement it, take the time to actually train it, utilize it, give it feedback, feed it your SOPs, your messaging, your tone — you could go into Claude or ChatGPT and say, "give me — I want to feed my AI agent everything I have in my memory of our practice, our tone, our content, everything, how we talk. Here's the link to my website with my terms and conditions, my cancellation policies, all our bookings, all our content." And maybe that's the source of truth, and then you give it access to the EMR, push that into the ecosystem — the amount of intelligence that thing receives, it just gets up to speed. It's pretty cool.

Jason: Yeah, no, it's awesome. I think the other important part we see is working with your team on the best way to work with this agent. Sometimes we see front desk staff who are intimidated by it, or nervous — like, "what is this agent doing, I can do this five percent better." So working with your team on identifying how to get out of the way and let the agent do the work, and what are the higher-leverage things your team could be doing instead of what they're used to — which might be babysitting a texting inbox or babysitting meta leads as they come in — once you've built that trust.

Why AI adoption is no longer optional

Cameron: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think sometimes there are practice owners out there who think AI isn't there yet — "I'll get around to it, I'll get around to it." Look, I think the time is now, it's no longer optional. I use multiple AI tools a day, and the amount of efficiency I have inside my own ecosystem — I produce this podcast with the amount of AI I use — I don't even know how I was doing it before. Was I really doing all this manually and piecemealing it together? This stuff is amazing. So what are your thoughts for the practice owner listening today who's hearing everybody talk about AI at conferences, on podcasts, everywhere — give them one hardcore reason why it's not optional for a practice owner in particular. From their entire workflow — I guess it could be optional, they're free to use whatever they want — but from your stance, from a thought leader's standpoint, why is it not optional? Why can't I just keep doing what I'm doing — I'm the best injector in the world and my patients love me?

Jason: Yeah, yeah, I think the challenge is you're in a competitive market with lots of practices out there, and people are all trying this stuff out — some of it works, some doesn't, and everybody's learning. Like you said, you have to give it some time and invest in improving it, but people are interacting with your practice and with other service providers, and they're getting accustomed to a service that's empowered and accelerated by AI. So I think you risk — like you said when we began — that over the next five years there's going to be a lot of change in the market, and AI is going to supercharge a lot of people to do their very best work and grow their businesses in ways we couldn't have imagined a few years ago. If you're not harnessing that, you're on the other side of it. And similarly, on the consumer side, people are getting more and more used to working with AI — a huge share of AI usage out there is probably questions related to health or services people are receiving. People aren't nervous to talk to AI about this stuff. So we don't need to worry that people are so accustomed to the human touch that this won't work — of course the human touch is still super important when people get into a practice or have something complex to handle in person — but I don't think you're offending anybody by leveraging AI and taking full advantage of the intelligence that's available.

Cameron: I agree, 100%. To your point on Amazon earlier — we used to think we needed to go to the store, have that human touch, and that online sales would never work, there's no way people would spend fifty bucks, thirty bucks online. I just spent a couple grand on some bikes recently and had full trust they'd show up and work, and guess what, they did. It's this massive shift taking place, especially with younger user adoption. Gen Z is coming in, and Gen Z is very much a practice's ideal customer profile from a patient standpoint — that's real, and they're embracing AI. I was reading a study recently that they'd rather communicate with AI than with a human, which might sound weird to guys like you and me. I don't know, I'm 41 years old, but I guess I'm old enough to remember when text messaging came out — I had a phone and thought, why would we text, why don't I just call somebody? And now it's, "don't call me, just text me, please text me first if you're going to call me." That's just proper etiquette now — literally someone calls me and I think, why is he calling me, he should've texted first. But that's the shift that's taking place. They want this frictionless communication, they want instant gratification — that's the economy we live in. And maybe we're losing a little bit of personal touch — obviously the consultation process is still a wonderful place for that personal touch, people going to your Instagram, looking at who you are, your personality, your expertise, your education, your facility — they're already shopping you online. And then when they reach out, what happens when no one picks up the phone? What happens when no one responds to a text? What happens when they can't book online? We're all just busy, we've got to get stuff done, check it off the list — if I want to book an appointment Tuesday at two o'clock, I just need to book it at two o'clock, let me get it done because I have to leave.

Legacy EMR vs. AI-first, and why the agent is the hard part

Cameron: So I think you're right about this frictionless environment, and for a new business model in aesthetics — there have been EMRs around for years — would you say it's more challenging to have a legacy EMR and build AI on top of it, versus coming in as an AI-first EMR? I'm not sure — you're way more technical than me, I'm just curious: is it easier to go AI-first, or legacy tech and then build AI on top?

Jason: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think increasingly, a whole different world of how AI is changing things is building software itself — with AI, building software, menus, workflows, triggers, and so forth is really easy. Not to say it doesn't take time, and you need to do it carefully to make sure there aren't bugs, but that gets easier and easier. So I think that deeply understanding how to provide the very best agents in the market — ones who can work hard on your behalf and are trainable — that's the hardest and most important work. Like I said, over the last year, eighteen months, we've built out an EMR and the capabilities needed to handle all those workflows inside Podium. It's been work, but our opinion is the hard part is the agents and getting that right, and then, yes, we needed the EMR capabilities and workflows available to those agents in the platform.

Enterprise value, private equity, and solving operational bottlenecks

Cameron: Now let's take a practice that's done the work — they've made the acquisition, they have an AI EMR operating system, I don't even know if that's what you guys call it, but that's just what it inherently feels like to me. By the way, I'm a twenty-year CRM and process-automation guy. I'm not just — I've been in aesthetics for ten years, in a med spa. So I get it, you're way more technical than me. I look at it from an enterprise value standpoint too — a lot of these practices are going to trade in the next three, five, seven years, and they're going to trade more than once. There's a ton of private equity coming in — in fact I was on a call earlier today with Aviva, they've acquired tons of practices, planned a pretty aggressive roll-up, and have a nice value proposition. These are very intelligent buyers, very sophisticated underwriters. A few years ago they didn't understand the tech rails — lead to booking to follow-up to patient to reporting to revenue per hour to health of the practice to utilization rate, tie that back to marketing, push a button, something goes out. They didn't know any of that. All they thought was, this is an attractive space with repeat business, we're getting out of dental, we've been in there for years, we're going into aesthetics and making acquisitions. Now they're asking: who has the best tech? Where are we saving the most time? What's the utilization rate? What's the revenue per hour? How quickly can I deploy this? It's not just a tool anymore — it's going to change scalability and enterprise value. This is where the conversation gets really interesting, because it's not just about tech anymore, it's about true enterprise value from an investor's lens. It's going to reduce chaos, reduce front-desk dependency, improve booking rates, increase utilization and lifetime value — I could go on. But from an operational-bottleneck standpoint, is that what you guys are really trying to solve — fragmentation? Getting rid of the bottlenecks? What happens when staff leave? What metrics improve the fastest? Who owns what track and swim lanes? What are your thoughts there?

Jason: Yeah, yeah, no, we definitely see a ton of that. In some ways I think back to a book from an entrepreneurship class in college called The E-Myth — it's an old book at this point, but the whole thesis was: you got into business because there was some service or thing you loved making or providing, and then you got into it and realized, wait a minute, this is becoming more about the operational nightmare of running a business than doing the thing I love. What we think about every day is turning that on its head and letting somebody who started a business focus on what they love — the reason they got into it, working with patients, changing their lives, providing great services — and not worry about the other stuff, because we can provide tools in AI that handle all of that operational runaround so they can focus on what they do best and get really good at it. The winners in a world with AI are those who can leverage it to get really good at the thing they do best.

Cameron: Yeah, and I'm telling you, from a practice owner standpoint, they love helping patients — they come from care, they come from helping patients, they want to spend time with them, help them improve how they look and feel, help them build confidence. And they get bogged down with all the administrative duties. Even if they hire front desk staff and train them, they could be training them the wrong way — the legacy way — and they're going to get moved out of the path pretty quickly.

Podium's AI operating system and the future of jobs

Cameron: So now, from a Podium standpoint, what's the vision for AI? Really, from a native-practice perspective, walk us through where Podium is headed. I know where you guys are now, I think I have an understanding — I'm sure there's a lot you haven't told the market yet, and that's totally fine, I'm not asking you to disclose anything. But from a broader standpoint, where are you headed? Because what's interesting to me is you don't just build AI as an add-on feature — it is the system, you can see the infrastructure around it.

Jason: Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. You said earlier "AI operating system," which is kind of what we've internally started calling this — this is a tool where AI runs your business, and it's at the heart of that. All the tools the AI uses and has access to, you as a user have access to as well, and that really matters. But the AI being really capable and impactful for the business is what we think about a lot. The agent we've talked most about today, and that you hear most about from Podium in the marketplace, is the one that handles communication with your customer — does outreach, responds to inbound requests, works on your calendar, answers questions, and can be tailored to a particular patient based on the information in the EMR you choose to make available to it — their membership, their benefits, credits, vouchers, and so forth.

Jason: Another side of this we touched on is this idea of an agent you use to perform surgery, in a sense, on your customer-facing agent — there's a lot of growth and opportunity there. This idea that you can interact with an agent that's for you, your assistant in a sense, that has access to everything inside the platform and can help you understand what's going on and then take action on your behalf. We're building a bunch of reporting and capabilities that exist in the market because people need them, and we'll continue to invest in that. But increasingly we think the way you interact with software will be the software talking to you, telling you the things you need to know, and you telling it, "yes, this is how I want to handle it this time," or "every Tuesday morning, just go ahead and take care of this for me." And yeah, we've got a pilot of a version of that out with a bunch of customers, and it's honestly really exciting. We have people doing some really incredible things with it who talk about how it's reignited their love for this industry and what they can do as a practice owner, because — like I said — they want to focus on what they do best and love doing, and this lets them do that. Without getting into too much detail, you'll hear more from Podium about this in the future, but this idea of an operational agent that can act on your behalf inside the tool, and continue to expand what's possible for AI to handle for you, is something we think a lot about. We really believe it's a core part of the future of how businesses will be run.

Cameron: So what do you think — I know we're talking about five years, what jobs do you think are going to disappear? We're in '26, so we've got three and a half years, I guess. What jobs are going to disappear if this type of tech is injected into a system that manages the patient of record, the day-to-day, the charting, the appointments, the payments?

Jason: Yeah, yeah. I think it's the jobs that are the go-between — where I take information and hand it off into a system, or to another person — there's no reason an agent can't handle that, either by handing it off or by handling the whole process. So that looks like cases that are a lot of just routine interactions, the same adjustments on the calendar or whatever, every time — those are the jobs where we can make things really streamlined and let people focus on the share of their job that's providing more value and driving the business forward.

Cameron: So you think it'll put them in a position to actually focus on more important objectives — growth strategy, efficiencies — versus just throwing a body at a mundane task?

Jason: Yeah. In between. Right, right. An example we've talked about a lot here is reaching out to a patient at the right time to follow up — because they never got back to you, or because it's time for them to come in and they haven't yet. A lot of people are still doing that manually, or feeling guilty about not doing it manually — they've got that stack of papers with people whose memberships are about to expire, or vouchers, whatever. Being able to say, "that work just handles itself" —

Automating patient follow-up at scale

Cameron: Yeah, it'd be nice to pull a list of patients who haven't been in for four months, and — actually, I don't even want to pull the list, Jason. It's one thing to go into a system, pull a list or a report, and say, "hey, Sally, go call them all." And Sally's like, "that's 300 phone calls?" "Yeah, let me know the outcome of all of them." "Okay, well, when do you want this done?" "I need it done by tomorrow." All right, well — that's a big thing. Do you guys have a feature that can do something like that? Because I don't even want to pull the list, I just want to text it and say, "go get this done, here's what I want you to say."

Jason: Yeah, no, that's exactly what we're seeing with this operational agent we're talking about, where you can say, "every Tuesday morning, I want you to do this, and pull me in — tell me what you're going to do before you do it." Maybe you want to put your eyes on it quickly before you say yes. But instead of building a tool to export the list, let you go through it, take it to some other tool, upload it, write out the message, figure out whether you want the message to be different for different segments — you can just say, "you know my business and my patients, and my goal is keeping the calendar full, and I've got some space next week — what can we do to fill that in?"

Cameron: Do you think eventually it'll become this extension of the practice where it's like, "dude, I trust you"? Imagine somebody who's been using it for three or four years — it's trained, it knows your personality, how you operate, when you need the calendar full, what your providers' personalities and expertise are. At some point, when you have that much trust — there are some people on my team I trust to just get it done, and others where I say, "let's meet before, make sure you have the SOP." It's that point where you're like, just run, you've got it.

Jason: Yeah, no, I think that's the direction we're headed.

Wrap-up and exclusive offer

Cameron: That's fascinating. I love it. I know there were a lot of other talking points we were going to get to, but having you on and talking about the tech, the AI, and where you're going, and the real impact of the software — I think that was really important, so I wanted to focus on that.

Jason: Yeah, that was fun.

Cameron: Yeah. You guys also have — I think if listeners tune in and want to take action and learn more about Podium — you have some sort of exclusive offer, right? I wasn't sure exactly.

Jason: Yeah, yeah, we do have an exclusive offer for listeners. I think our team will put something in the show notes, but if you mention the podcast, we've got a special offer in place for folks who want to learn more.

Cameron: Oh, cool, yeah. So if you guys are curious, if you want to learn more, go reach out to them — I'll put a link in if you want to go through there. But if you mention the Medical Millionaire podcast or my name, there's some sort of exclusive offer, I think it's worth exploring. I don't know where you guys are with the audience on EMRs — I know the other thing is, "oh, do I want to change EMRs, that's a big thing, a pain in the butt." I haven't personally been through it, but I've talked to your team, and it sounds like the onboarding process is quite seamless. That's always a conversation point. But hey, man, I've really enjoyed having you on. I know you've got AI agents to deploy, build, and train, so I'll leave it at that. Go connect with them, go reach out to these guys, see what they're doing — they're at every conference with really cool booths and giveaways. So check them out, and I'll leave it there. Until next time, happy injecting.

Cameron: Thanks for listening to Medical Millionaire. Built for operators, founders, and leaders in medical aesthetics who want to grow with intention, increase profitability, and create real enterprise value. If this episode helped you, subscribe on YouTube, follow Cameron Hemphill on Instagram, and share it with a colleague who needs to hear it. For more insights and resources, visit CameronHemphill.com. Until next time, keep building your practice like a business.