Scaling Practice Management by Talkie.ai

What if the camera already on your patient's phone could take their vitals? Przemek Jaworski is co-founder and CTO of Shen AI. Their camera-based engine reads heart rate, HRV, breathing rate and blood pressure from 30 seconds of looking into a lens - now CE-certified as a medical device in Europe. Before that, Przemek built 3D printers sold to SpaceX and Apple. He joins Jakub Grajcar to explain ho...

"Bereavement leave ends. Bereavement doesn't." Everyone shows up for the funeral, then goes back to living - and that is the week your team member comes back to work. Kelly Edmondson is a nurse executive with 25 years in healthcare and a certified grief counselor. After losing her son in 2023, she founded Timely Presence, which sends a year of gifts timed to the dates that land hardest - the birth...

A real practice should survive two weeks with the owner gone. If it can't, you don't own a business - you own a job. Alejandro "Alex" Fernandez has spent more than 30 years in physician practice management, front desk to boardroom. He ran multi-specialty groups as large as 150 physicians and was founding CEO of Gastro Health, the first private-equity-backed gastroenterology platform to sell. He no...

Your insurance pays out when the building burns. It doesn't pay out when the hurricane misses and you close for ten days anyway. Van Carlson is Founder and CEO of SRA 831(b) Admin, the largest administrator of 831(b) plans - a part of the tax code that lets small and mid-sized practices set aside pre-tax dollars for the risks insurance won't touch. He has almost 30 years in risk management and hos...

Private equity owns a lot of medical practices - except it usually doesn't own the practice at all. John Rhodes has practiced healthcare law for nearly 20 years, most recently leading the legal team at Walmart Health. In February 2025 he founded Health Law Counsel in Denver, where he represents everyone from large health systems to medical practice, behavioral health and AI startups. He also hosts...

Every touchpoint in your practice either builds trust or erodes it - including your hold music and the clipboard at your front desk. Joshua Altman was a multimedia journalist at The Hill before founding beltway.media, where he works as a fractional chief communications officer. Instead of hiring an agency or a full-time comms team, practices bring him in to run the whole function - branding, PR, w...

Where does AI actually fit in a medical practice - and where should it never go? Stephen Ferrara, DNP, has been a nurse practitioner for 26 years, served as president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, and ran the AI office at Columbia University School of Nursing. He now runs AI + Nurse Academy, teaching the world's largest healthcare workforce how to use this technology. He join...

Your patients are already using AI. The question is whether your practice is ready for what they bring through the door. Chris Hutchins spent 25 years building and defending the data systems behind real clinical care - including as Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Northwell Health and Lifepoint Health. He now advises health systems and boards on AI governance through Hutchins Data Strategy Cons...

How do you get a busy front desk to accept new technology - without a revolt? Leasa Horst, CPA, has been practice administrator at ESD Pediatric Group - a two-location Cincinnati practice caring for families for over 80 years - for more than 30 of them. She's led her team through paper-to-EHR, central phones, and most recently an AI receptionist (ESD Group is a Talkie.ai client). In this podcast,...

Most independent practices assume they're stuck with whatever their EHR ships with - the default scribe, the default CRM, the default everything. Brendan Keeler says that's no longer true. Known to many as the "Health API Guy," Brendan leads the interoperability practice at HTD Health and has seen the EHR world from nearly every angle - 5.5 years inside Epic, plus stints at Redox, Zus Health, and...

When you're growing a practice, it's easy to let the numbers start making your decisions for you. Dr. Louis Gilbert refuses to. Dr. Louis Gilbert, founder and CEO of Cornerstone MD, is building a multi-location family medicine group across Houston and Pasadena, Texas - with a goal of opening a new clinic every year. He joins Jakub Grajcar to talk leadership, integrity, and growing a practice witho...

Most practices chase marketing tactics - SEO, ads, podcasts, webinars - before they ever settle on a strategy. Saul Marquez calls that the treadmill, and he says it's where most growth quietly dies. Saul spent two decades in medical device sales, left a VP role, and bootstrapped Outcomes Rocket into a global healthcare marketing agency - now 1,900+ interviews deep with founders, CEOs, and clinicia...

Can a nurse practitioner build more than a one-person practice that just replaces a salary? Amanda Guarniere says yes - and most NPs never find out because nobody shows them what's possible. Amanda is a Yale-educated NP with 15 years of clinical experience, VP of Enterprise Partnerships at Guardian MD, and the founder of The Resume RX. She also runs her own wellness and aesthetics practice - so sh...

What does scaling Uber across 300 cities have to do with running a medical practice? More than you'd think. Cornelius Schmahl spent five years at Uber launching the service across Europe and Africa, finishing as interim CEO of a national branch where he led a $3.7 billion merger. He went on to become COO of a telemedicine company, made 100+ angel investments, and now coaches founders of high-growt...

What if you could design a primary care practice from a blank canvas - AI at the front door, overhead at half the industry average, and every minute saved reinvested in the doctor-patient relationship? Dr. Zeshan Rajput is doing it. A physician, clinical informaticist, and MBA with 15+ years across EHR implementations and federal health IT strategy, he's now building New Hope Primary Care in Colum...

Most practice managers got promoted into leadership without anyone teaching them how to lead. The result is real, daily knowledge gaps that quietly cost practices in turnover, denied claims, and legal exposure. Mike Lyons, SPHR - founder of Seasoned Advice and host of Eye Care Leadership Live - spent nearly six years building the HR function at Austin Retina Associates before going independent. He...

Is your practice website quietly setting up the next HIPAA lawsuit - and is your marketing message actually landing with patients who don't yet know they need you? Tim Bouchard, CEO of Buffalo-based agency Luminus and host of the Healthcare Marketing Edge podcast, joins Jakub to share 20+ years of healthcare marketing lessons. From building patient-centric brand messages to fixing the analytics se...

What does it actually look like when a practice puts culture first - not as a slogan, but as an operating system? Dr. Joy Evers - board-certified emergency physician, CEO and founder of Healthtopia Clinics, and host of the Your Doctor Wants to Quit podcast - joins Jakub Grajcar to share how she built a four-location integrative primary care practice serving 35,000 patients in Southern California....

Most practices know they should be doing more with technology. Fewer have actually built it out. Dr. Elizabeth Edens - Founder of Health Meets Wellness and Medical Director at TouchCare Method - has. She joins Jakub to walk through what a fully digitized patient journey actually looks like in practice: a custom mobile app, an AI health coach, wearable integrations, and touchpoints that keep patien...

Why is the direct primary care (DPC) model gaining so much popularity? And what does it actually take to scale a direct primary care practice - from a single clinic to an 11-location organization with nearly 30 providers? Dr. Kyle Rickner, co-founder and chairman of Primary Health Partners, joins Jakub Grajcar to share the full story. From the decision to leave the fee-for-service world, to the ve...

What's quietly burning out your best clinicians - and what can practice managers actually do about it? Justin Lambert, CEO at Nomad Health - a leading digital marketplace with access to over 400,000 qualified clinicians - joins Jakub Grajcar to dig into the staffing and flexibility challenges that don't always show up on a P&L. From how to triage patient calls the right way to why travel clini...

What does healthcare marketing strategy look like when you can't promise a happy ending? Jennifer Knowlton, Director of Digital Marketing at The Care Team and a 20-year healthcare marketing veteran, joins Jakub to pull back the curtain on one of the hardest niches in the industry: post-acute and hospice care marketing. From navigating HIPAA constraints to building a patient acquisition strategy th...

What's the point of investing in marketing if your front desk lets the leads slip away? Cheri Cobb, founder of Cheri Cobb Creative and a 15-year veteran of healthcare growth strategy, joins Jakub Grajcar to expose the gap that's quietly costing medical and aesthetic practices thousands in lost revenue every month. We dig into: 📊 Why your lead-to-consultation rate matters more than your Instagram...

Follow us for more practice management advice! In this episode, Jakub Grajcar sits down with Melissa DelFino, founder of Modern Distinction, a practice management and leadership consulting brand. Melissa’s mission is to help medical leaders move past "analysis paralysis" to create systems, culture, and teams that actually work. We dive deep into the often-overlooked "human" side of practice manage...

Follow/rate the show for more practice manager tips! In this episode, Jakub Grajcar sits down with Amanda Buchanan, Director at Voyage Practice Management, a full-service medical billing company. With over 24 years of experience in healthcare management—including 16 years running a large ambulatory surgical center—Amanda shares her expert playbook for practice growth. We dive into why the right so...