On/Offcall: See the Best AI Tools for Doctors, Featured Live
Welcome back to On/Offcall!
If primary care is the backbone of healthcare, why do we keep building technology that ignores it? 🤔
This week’s How I Doctor guest is Dr. David Nichols, a family physician and medical director at Jefferson Health who is working to bring AI into clinical workflows. His argument? Primary care is the API of healthcare, and the API is broken. David co-founded a healthcare company at 23, ran it through medical school and residency, and now he’s on a mission to help change primary care. He sat down with guest host Dr. Michael Hobbs to explore:
→ Why primary care physicians have the clearest view of what's broken in healthcare
→ Why clinicians should be building AI tools, not just adopting them
→ Why "hours saved" might be the wrong way to measure AI's impact
→ What it actually takes to make AI stick in clinical practice
🎙️ New How I Doctor episode out now
Download to join the waitlistMedicine 
is complex enough.
Referrals 
shouldn't be.
Send and receive referrals, build wealth, and grow your physician community with Offcall.
Congratulations to Columbus’ Most Trusted Physicians 2026!
Every physician knows the feeling: a patient needs a specialist. A diagnosis is more complicated than it looks on paper. Your own family member asks who they should see. And somewhere in that moment, a name comes to mind.
This week, we were proud to introduce the 2026 Columbus Most Trusted Physicians, a collaboration between Offcall and the Columbus Medical Association recognizing 113 physicians, and 13 other medical professionals, who have earned the trust of their fellow doctors. We created this initiative around a simple question: Who are the physicians you trust most with your patients and your own family?
We invited physicians across Columbus to nominate the colleagues they turn to, rely on, and recommend. The resulting list is a celebration of the people whose reputations have been built not through marketing or popularity, but through the relationships they’ve developed with their peers. Behind every great referral is a physician who knows whom to trust. To the 113 physicians and 13 other medical professionals recognized this year: Congratulations. And to every physician in Columbus: thank you for helping us recognize the people who make this medical community extraordinary.
We hope this initiative inspires others across the country to reconnect with a trusted colleague, discover someone new, and remember that the strength of medicine has always come, in part, from the physicians who support one another.
Explore the full list here
Reminder: See You At This Week’s Upcoming AI Webinar!
This week, join Offcall + Ultralight for: How Independent Physicians Are Using AI to Run Their Practices, a free live webinar on what an AI-supported independent practice actually looks like.
Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker, DPC pediatrician and AI educator Dr. Michael Hobbs MD, Curator CEO Dr. Hillary Lin, and Ultralight CEO Sunita Mohanty will cover:
👉 Running your practice: What an AI-supported practice actually looks like day to day
👉 Working with patients: Help patients use AI to research their health while becoming more critical of what they find
👉 Research: Use AI to stay current on new treatments and evidence without drowning in papers
👉 Plus, a live demo of Ultralight in action.
📆 October 29 | 2pm PT / 5pm ET
RSVP HERE
Physician Spotlight: Meet Andrew Lundquist
Meet Dr. Andrew Lundquist, practicing surgeon, CMO, and clinical AI advisor
1. Andrew, what's one task you've fully handed off to AI that you'd never take back? I gave initial patient documentation over to AI a few years ago and I won't go back. I am engaged and alert with AI doing the "remembering" and before that I was distracted during visits. I'd avoid conversations because I was always behind. Now I just review the AI generated notes and do a few changes and sign. It takes 30 seconds to a minute instead of 10-15 minutes. My latest effort is using AI to increase my reach on social media and platforms.
2. Are you worried about deskilling — that the next generation won't develop the intuition you did because the model handled it? Yes and no. Those coming out of training will never do work like we did and that's Ok. We will have to build intuition training another way. One internist in my group who is "old school" says that the biggest skill for a clinician to know is knowing "sick from well." I tend to agree that being able to distill physical findings, lab and imaging data, and tiny history details then doing the right thing is the basis of "value based care." We will always need clinicians who can do $20,000 worth of care in a 99213 visit. Maybe we train that by withholding current tools until mastery of the basics is proven.
3. Will AI solve the physician shortage or quietly make it worse? I have more questions than answers here. Long term it will solve it, but short term it will be messy. Part of me thinks that people will always want to go to an excellent clinician to make sense of AI. However, Waymo has me thinking that we will need fewer physicians because we can offload complex things to technology. An AI answer often contains better information than what you get in a 10 minute clinical visit, but do you trust it? People will seek out trust. We will want all of the benefits of AI and have options to see the specialist opinion for the human element. The AI doctor should cost less, and the human cost more, but will it? I think that we will have a slice of the population who will be able to afford the AI option and the expert opinion. Watching to see who gets better outcomes will be fascinating.
4. Independent practice in 2026 — endangered species or quiet comeback? Independent practice is where I have practiced for almost 20 years. I think it's both endangered and the future of excellent care. The headwinds that independent practices have are real, but there is really good data that shows that they have the same or better quality, lower cost, and better results under risk than hospital or large group practice. As the CMO at the largest independent multispecialty group in my state, I'm doing all that I can to make sure that independent practice remains an option for physicians.
5. If you had a magic wand for one thing in medicine, what would you fix tomorrow? I would love to get people to understand that how they go about their days is medicine. I would like them to see how their choices, lifestyle, friendships, diet, and spiritual practices shape their health in 20-30 years. A few visits to a clinician a year can't undo things. In Europe, they have pictures of gangrenous limbs on cigarette boxes... like that, except for more culturally acceptable habits.
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.
Go and buy her book, Jaiwant Rangi
Endocrinologist Dr. Jaiwant Rangi wrote a new book entitled “The Diabetes Blueprint” which offers “a complete protocol for reversing Type 2, building lasting remission, and healing the organs that matter for the decades ahead.” She shares about the books: “Every person with diabetes deserves what every person with cancer now receives: a clear map, a staging, a sense of which window they are standing in, and a plan that fits their biology. Learn more and download the book here.
Great read, Lauren Gleason
Dr. Lauren J. Gleason published an NEJM Catalyst article showing that greater adherence to the age-friendly 4Ms — What Matters to patients, Medication safety, Mentation (delirium, dementia, and depression), and Mobility — is associated with shorter hospital stays and a lower likelihood of discharge to a postacute care facility. Alongside co-authors Dr. Maylyn Martinez, Edem Asamoa, Robert Thombley and Rachel Baccile. Read more here.
Another great read, Robert Wachter
Dr. Robert Wachter worked with Jesse Burk-Rafel on a JAMA perspective on medical education in the age of AI. Their conclusions: we should divide the world into a) capabilities to newly cultivate (how to effectively be the "physician in the loop"; b) old capabilities to emphasize (particularly communication, physical exam, and management reasoning) & c) old capabilities to (carefully) deemphasize. Read more here.
Important essay, Vamsi Varra
Dr. Vamsi Varra penned a new MDCalc essay entitled “Know Which AI You’re Trusting” about the need to ask which type of AI model product a recommendation before you act on it. “A rule, a regression, and a language model fail in different ways. Clinicians, health systems, and tool builders should know which one is talking.” Read more here.
Congratulations to Baltimore’s Top Doctors 2026
Dr. Amit Jain was named to Baltimore Magazine’s 2026 Top Doctors, alongside several of his colleagues at Johns Hopkins Orthopaedic Surgery, including Amiethab Aiyer, Dawn Laporte, Lucas Nikkel, Uma Srikumaran, Sophie Strike, and Savyasachi Thakkar. Learn more here.
Career highlights, congrats all
Dr. Renee Crichlow was elected to the American Academy of Family Physicians' Board of Directors! Dr. Sia Daneshmand is beginning an exciting new chapter at UCLA as Director of the Institute of Urologic Oncology and Division Chief of Urologic Oncology (h/t Dr. Andrew Hung here). Dr. Sarah Nosal is starting a new position as Chairperson of the Board at American Academy of Family Physicians! Dr. Ally Abel was named to Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Jefferson University’s 2026 Resident Teaching Honor Roll during her final year as chief resident. Dr. Joshua A. Ronen has been awarded the Fellow in Hospital Medicine designation by the Society of Hospital Medicine as part of the Fellows Class of 2027.
Did Someone Share On/Offcall With You?
Thanks for reading. Each week, we bring the latest news, information, financial and career tips, and dose of inspiration to your inbox. Our community is growing fast! Join us by subscribing to this newsletter. And please be sure to forward this newsletter to your colleagues and friends. Thank you!
Subscribe
Download to join the waitlistMedicine is complex enough.
Referrals shouldn't be.
Send and receive referrals, build wealth, and grow your physician community with Offcall.
Offcall Team is the official Offcall account.
Comments
(0)
Join the conversation
See what your colleagues are saying and add your opinion.