On/Offcall: Introducing Offcall's New Referral Tool and Network
🚨It’s time to fix referrals in healthcare!
This week, we announced the private beta for Offcall’s new referral tool and network for and by clinicians, starting in our first market of Columbus. We’ll be rolling out city by city in the months to come!
After spending months listening to primary care and specialist practices across the country, we heard the same thing over and over: Referrals are slow. They’re fragmented. And they’re still stuck in 1985 workflows that don’t work for us or our patients. So we built a solution to:
👉 Find the right specialist by specialty, procedure, or location in seconds
👉 Send and receive referrals in one tap. No more fax numbers or phone tag
👉 Track the status of your referrals in real-time
👉 Reach clinicians in your community instantly with HIPAA-compliant 1:1 and group messaging
👉 Simplify referral workflows for your coordinators, staff, and entire team
We can’t agree on much in healthcare, but if there’s one thing we can align on as physicians, it’s this: Referrals are broken, everywhere and for everyone.
Dr. Graham Walker and Dr. Basil Kahwash wrote a Fixing Referrals open letter, and we’d if you can add your name as a supporter (thanks to everyone who signed thus far!). If you’re in Columbus, you download the app and start using it today!
Know someone who would benefit from joining us? Help us grow our tent by forwarding this newsletter to your physician colleagues and subscribing here.
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How Sevaro Is Transforming Rural Stroke Care, With Dr. Raj Narula and Dr. Melanie Winningham
This week, we welcomed Dr. Rajiv Narula and Dr. Melanie J. Winningham to How I Doctor! As a vascular neurologist and Founder and CEO of Sevaro, Dr. Narula set out to solve the alarming access issues in stroke care. It’s a simple idea: Where you live should not be the biggest predictor of whether you walk out of the hospital after a stroke. Alongside Dr. Winningham, a stroke specialist and VP of Clinical Strategy, Dr. Narula and his team built a solution that can actually achieve this.
They join Graham to break down Sevaro’s solution and what it will take to actually fix stroke care now and in the future:
👉 How eliminating the “middleman” (call centers, paging, admin layers) has been the key to Sevaro making stroke care actually work
👉 What it looks like to get a board-certified neurologist on screen virtually, in under 45 seconds, and why that changes everything
👉 How AI should support clinical decision-making, not replace it, by anticipating what physicians need
👉 Why the neurology workforce gap is getting squeezed and how virtual care is becoming a real solution
👉 The single regulatory change that could unlock access to specialty care for millions overnight
❤️ Thanks Dr. Narula and Dr. Winningham for building the system for and by physicians that patients need.
🎧 Listen to the full episode now
See the Highlights From This Week’s AI Webinar!
We're still buzzing from this week’s AI webinar, where we had 550 physicians, over 200 comments, and a highly engaged audience led by Graham, Dr. Michael Hobbs and special guest Rishma Jivan.
The session was all about practical, real-world AI use cases, understanding failure modes, and giving you a simple framework to evaluate AI tools. One moment that stuck with us? The CRAFT Check: a simple, powerful 30-second quality gate before you trust any AI output. A big thank you to our partners Evidently and MD+ for supporting this work! 🙌
See the slides from the session here and you can also watch a replay here.
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
Physician Spotlight: Dr. Joseph Shapiro
6 questions with Dr. Joseph Shapiro, pediatric emergency medicine physician and clinical ethicist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.
1. Joseph, what do you think the public most misunderstands about being a physician in 2026? Getting good healthcare and being healthy has become harder for many people, and they see a parade of economic actors — hospital systems, insurers, drug companies — that seem to be making money off them. There's a natural inclination to lump doctors into that group. But most physicians make significant personal sacrifices to care for patients. We're on their side more than not.
2. Forget pizza parties — what's one way you've coped with burnout that's actually made a difference? Diversification. You have to find ways to be a doctor without spending all day in front of the EMR. For me, that has meant building an academic career — writing, teaching, and ethics consulting.
3. What's the hardest part about being a physician that you think should be talked about more openly? For the ER, it's a white-collar job that is hard on your body. I'm not sure people realize how physically demanding ER work can be with the schedule flipping and late nights. ER physicians don't work 40-hour weeks because we can't. It's more like the NFL — play once a week, then recover — than the MLB, where there's a game almost every day.
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