On/Offcall: Will Doctors Get Sued for Using AI? Attorney Vincent Joralemon Weighs In
Welcome back to On/Offcall!
“The biggest legal mistake a physician can make with medical AI right now is to fully trust it.”
That’s Vincent Joralemon, director of the UC Berkeley Life Sciences Law & Policy Center, with a warning for every physician using AI, or treating patients who do. If AI gives your patient bad medical advice, who's legally responsible? Vincent's research suggests that physicians could find themselves at the center of the liability question.
This week on How I Doctor, he sits down with Dr. Graham Walker to explore:
→ Why the “learned intermediary” doctrine could leave physicians responsible for AI-influenced decisions
→ Whether asking patients “What did ChatGPT tell you?” could become part of the standard of care
→ How physicians can protect themselves when following — or overriding — AI recommendations
→ Why AI could reshape the standard of care, and what that means for clinical judgment
→ When physicians may need to push back against AI tools their own hospitals require them to use
🎙️New How I Doctor episode out now
Download to join the waitlistMedicine 
is complex enough.
Referrals 
shouldn't be.
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Independent Physicians: Tell Us How You’re Using AI in Your Practice!
🚨 Independent physicians: We want to feature YOU in our upcoming AI workshop! Are you using AI to run your practice, save time, improve patient care, or tackle administrative headaches? We'll feature some of the most interesting examples LIVE during our October 29 free webinar!
We're teaming up with Ultralight for How Independent Physicians Are Using AI to Run Their Practices — a free, practical session featuring:
🎤 Dr. Graham Walker, Offcall co-founder
🎤 Dr. Michael Hobbs, pediatrician and AI educator
🎤 Dr. Hillary Lin, co-founder & CEO of Curator
🎤 Sunita Mohanty, co-founder & CEO of Ultralight, with a live product demo
We'll explore how physicians are using AI to streamline practice operations, work with patients, and keep up with the latest medical research.
📆 October 29 | 2pm PT / 5pm ET
🔗 Register free here
Reply directly with what you've built, what tools you're using, and what's actually working!
Physician Spotlight: Meet Asim Khan
Meet physician-entrepreneur and healthcare operator Dr. Asim Khan
1. What's something another physician taught you that permanently changed how you practice (and who was that physician)? Dr. Rezwan Ahmed at Methodist in Houston. He taught me that the patient in front of you is not the whole picture. He would ask about the family, the job, the neighborhood, the things that would determine whether the treatment actually worked after the patient left the building. I thought medicine was the diagnosis and the prescription. He showed me it was the context. I never forgot it. Every company I have built since is downstream of that lesson.
2. What's one thing you wish physicians in other specialties understood about yours? I'm a general practitioner. I never specialized, so I am the physician who sees everything and owns none of it. What I wish other specialties understood is that the generalist is the last line of defense. We catch the thing the specialist wasn't looking for, because they were looking at their organ. We don't get the credit or the reimbursement. We get the patient at 2 AM and we figure it out. I think every specialty should spend a year in general practice before subspecialty training. They would order fewer tests and ask more questions.
3. What's something about medicine you've changed your mind about? I used to think the best physicians were the ones who knew the most. I changed my mind. The best physicians know when to hand off. They call the specialist. They send the patient to surgery instead of watching one more week. Knowing the edge of your competence is the highest clinical skill there is. The same principle applies to business: knowing what you should not build yourself is how you build more.
4. What's something physicians tolerate today that they shouldn't? Running a business whose terms they don't own. The lease is in someone else's name. The payer contracts were signed without them. The EHR was chosen for them. The staffing model was set by a system they don't govern. They tolerate it because that's how it has always been done. Then they discover that twenty years of work has no transferable value, because everything ran on their personal effort. That is not a clinical problem. It is a structural one, and it is solvable.
5. What's the dumbest thing we do in American healthcare? We fragment everything. Diagnostics is one company. The practice is another. The building is another. The payer contract is another. Each one optimizes for itself, and the patient pays for the seams. Most of the waste in American healthcare lives in those seams, and nobody owns them because nobody operates across all of them. That is not an accident. The system rewards extraction over prevention, which is the opposite of what we were taught. The patient experiences all of it as one event, and no one in the system is accountable for the whole.
6. What's something patients are right to be angry about? The maze. A patient gets a diagnosis and then has to fight through five systems to get an answer to a simple question. The primary doctor doesn't have the specialist's note. The specialist never got the imaging. The hospital sent the records to the wrong address. The patient becomes the project manager of their own care because no one else is doing it. They are right to be furious. The fragmentation is not their fault, and they pay for it with their time and sometimes with their health.
7. Who is a physician you trust enough to send your own family to, and why? Dr. Pramod (Prince) Mehrok, a hospitalist at St. Joseph Hospital in Central California. What sets him apart is not the diagnosis. It's the initiative. He doesn't wait to be called. He calls. He checks on the patient when he doesn't have to. He treats people like people. My family would be safe with him because he would never let them feel like a revenue stream. That is rarer than it should be, and it is the whole job.
8. Who is a physician you think more doctors should know about, and why? Dr. Mysore Bhagavan, an internist at Loretto Hospital in Chicago. He was a true clinician who understood both the science and the art of medicine.
I remember a patient in the ICU with DKA and heavy heroin use whose vitals kept deteriorating. Every evening when we left, she was stable. Every night, we got the call that she was crashing. The labs and monitors couldn't tell us why. Dr. Bhagavan did. At the bedside, he read her breathing pattern and her pupils and they didn't fit DKA alone. She was using in the hospital. Her brother was bringing her drugs during ICU visiting hours. No gadget would have caught that. He caught it because he observed the patient and not just the lab numbers.
I build diagnostics and devices, so I'm the last person to dismiss technology. But he taught me what it's for: to sharpen a clinician's judgment, never to replace it. Most doctors will never hear his name. They should.
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.
Great work, Madura Sundareswaran
Dr. Madura Sundareswaran published a new quality improvement framework for family medicine doctors to advocate for reducing administrative burden. Read more here.
Great video, Elizabeth Kazarian
Dr. Elizabeth Kazarian published a video alongside Sonia Djafri about PA vs. MD salaries and the need for more salary transparency in healthcare. Watch it here!
Career news, congrats all!
Dr. Peter Watson will continue serving Henry Ford Health in new roles as Chief Medical Officer for the Henry Ford Employee Health Plan and Chief Medical Officer, Clinical Value for Henry Ford Medical Group. Learn more here. Dr. Keisuke Nakagawa has transitioned into two new roles at UC San Diego Health: Director, Office of the Chief Medical Officer and Program Director, West Health Intelligent Care Accelerator. Read more here. Dr. Morgan Jeffries has joined Alterra Labs as Chief Clinical Officer. Congratulate him here. Varun Singh has completed Vascular & Interventional Radiology residency and the inaugural MESH Incubator | Mass General Brigham Executive Innovation Fellowship under Dr. Marc Succi. Congratulate him here.
More career news, congratulations!
Dr. Gabriel Garcia is starting a new position as Staff Cardiothoracic Anesthesiologist at Cleveland Clinic! Dr. Neer Patel will be speaking at the upcoming Carolinas DPC Summit on October 24 (h/t Dr. Anne Gonzalez). Learn more here. Dr. Layla Abubshait is starting a new position as Emergency Medicine Residency Program Director at Jefferson Health! Dr. Esa Davis was inducted into the National Academy of Medicine (h/t Dr. Monica Bertagnolli). See more here.
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