AI Can Run Protocols, But Only Clinicians Create Healing | Dr. Chris Seitz, MD

What if AI could run every clinical protocol and you (the clinician) still felt more essential than ever? We sit down with Dr. Chris Seitz (board-certified in emergency medicine, licensed in all 50 states, and now CEO of Guardian Medical Direction) to rethink how modern care is built, supervised, and scaled. From trauma bays to telehealth, Chris shares why the “medicine is the medicine,” and how a functional, personalized mindset can live inside algorithm-driven environments without losing rigor.

We dig into the oversight gap that stops many great ideas at the door. Outside the hospital, nurses, PAs, and NPs hit a maze of state-by-state rules on ownership, supervision, and scope. 

The future theme is clear: let AI handle the checklist work while humans do the healing work. For students and early-career clinicians, we offer a challenge worth writing down: if AI runs the pathways, what unique value will you bring? Learn the business basics now, notice where presence beats memorization, and design a career that restores your craft.

If this conversation sparked a new way to see your role in healthcare, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review with the one moment that changed how you think about your value.

Transcript

Setting The Stakes For Clinicians

Ashley Love 0:00

Have you ever wondered why so many clinicians reach their goal and then quietly start looking for something else? Today you'll meet an emergency medicine physician who did everything you're being taught to do. Residency, boards, years in the ER, even got licensed in 50 states. And still realized his greatest impact wasn't where he was trained to stand. If you're pre-med, pre-PA, or early in your career, you've been told to focus on getting in. So you build the resume, you collect the hours, you follow the path exactly as it's been laid out. But no one is teaching you how medicine is changing or how to recognize when it's time to stop following and start thinking differently. In this episode, we're going to unpack what separates clinicians who build sustainable careers from those who slowly disconnect from the work they fought so hard to do. Welcome to Shadow Me Next, a podcast where I take you into and behind the scenes of the medical world to provide you with a deeper understanding of the human side of medicine. I'm Ashley, a physician assistant, medical editor, clinical preceptor, and the creator of Shadow Me Next. I invite you to join me as we take a conversational and personal look into the lives and minds of leaders in medicine. This is Shadow Me Next with Dr. Chris Seitz. Dr. Seitz, thank you so much for joining us on Shadow Me Next today. You are incredibly accomplished, and the gift that you have given clinicians is phenomenal. And I cannot wait to talk about it. So thanks for being here with us today.

Dr. Chris Seitz 1:34

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Ashley Love 1:36

So you worked as an emergency medicine physician. Are you still working actively in the ER or have you totally transitioned?

Dr. Chris Seitz 1:43

So I'm still board certified. I'm actually having to re-up my boards. It's been my one of the old guard that has that every 10 years. I think they changed it to every five now. But um so I'm but so I'm currently board certified. I in the last year or so have not worked any shifts. I fully fully been a CEO and that's been taking up a lot of my time. But uh I licensed in all 50 states. So I I did a lot of travel locums medicine. So I will probably pop into ERs again here in the near future, but uh right now, right now a little too busy.

Leaving Shifts For Leadership

Ashley Love 2:12

Well, that's the beautiful thing about keeping your board certification, right? And the fact that you're licensed in all 50 states, I I'm really excited to ask you about that as well. But you know, you can you can go back to it, right? You have established this incredible business for people. Um, and you know, you are the amount of patients that you are helping has probably just exponentially exploded because now you're you're helping clinicians, right? Help those patients. So your your tree is so many more branches to that with patient care.

EM And Functional Medicine Mindset

Dr. Chris Seitz 2:40

And that's part, I mean, I guess I say I haven't I say I don't practice medicine right now. And at the same time, I mean every day I'm learning with the clinicians that we support. You know, I mean we're getting asked questions about protocols or questions about, you know, I actually went back and got functional medicine trained uh because a lot of our clientele are functional medicine practitioners. So um, yeah, I'm always especially when you're doing medical oversight, medical direction work, which is what we do. Uh yeah, you're you're always still, you may not be seeing the patient directly, but when you're supporting all the clinicians that do, I'm still answering those questions, still having to look stuff up, you know, still having to read and watch the YouTube videos again and all that good stuff.

Ashley Love 3:16

So heavily, heavily involved in patient care. Absolutely. Just a little bit different. So think back to your emergency medicine days. Um, tell us, tell us about something about emergency medicine that maybe people don't understand.

Quality Question: Your Value Post‑AI

Dr. Chris Seitz 3:29

I've had this obviously interesting path, uh, which has been very exciting and it's not done, and I I like not knowing what comes next. Um one of the things I think for me specifically, a unique perspective I have is the fact that I did practice very traditional, the most traditional medicine there is, which I would argue is emergency medicine, and then now and have trained in like the functional medicine wellness side of things. And I think what people people think those are completely different things. That there's traditional medicine and then there's new functional wellness, personalized care, and they are not the same. And if you're on TikTok or Instagram, that the traditional way is bad and the new way is good. Um and I just have such a different and unique perspective as I was learning about functional medicine myself and wellness and preventative care. I went into it thinking this is gonna be completely different than what I learned. And what I actually instead realized is that I had probably been practicing emergency medicine with a functional medicine mindset the whole time. Because it's really what it is. It's a mindset. It's resin, but the medicine is the medicine, how you approach that medicine really dictates what quote unquote type of medicine you're actually practicing. Um so you think emergency medicine, you think algorithms, you think you know, you're watching the show The Pit, which actually is a great show. You've learned it, it's great, very exciting. Give me a little PTSD. I thought I was working to shift the first episode, but that's okay. Um but like, you know, like you look at it, it's very algorithm-driven, protocol driven, like you know what to do next, or you know, or you're trying to trouble chew. But but how you show up in that as the healer, as the clinician, really is either that functional medicine personalized approach, or it's not whether you're using an algorithm or not. Even functional medicine, if you if you look at it, I mean there are algorithms that you can follow. So I think that there is this misconception that the two are upset.

Ashley Love 5:24

This is a great time to pause for quality questions. This is a segment on the show where we talk about an interview question that you might hear on your own pre-health interview. So, what I want to talk about right now is how the science of medicine is algorithms, ACLS, stroke pathways, antibiotic order, and how AI will likely handle more of that in the future. So here's the question I want you to wrestle with. If AI can run the protocols, what will define your value as a clinician? Is it your ability to memorize pathways? Is it your ability to create environments for healing? To read a room? To notice what's being not said? If you're preparing for professional school, this is the identity work no one is assigning you. Here's your action step for this week. When you shadow, notice one moment where the clinician's value has nothing to do with the protocol. Write it down because that is the art of medicine. And it doesn't just stop at quality questions. There are more resources for you as a pre-health student on Shadowme Next.com to include our newly released application readiness course. So head on over to courses.shadowmext.com and check it out.

Dr. Chris Seitz 6:40

There's algorithm-based, research-driven medicine, and then there's this personalized, explorative, you know, like you know, science, being a pioneer. And it's always the same. We've always said it's the science and art of medicine. I was talking about those two things. Like that is what we're talking about. Those are the different things, right?

Education As Everyday Emergency Care

Ashley Love 6:59

Absolutely. That's a fantastic misconception, actually. And it brings me to another question, and that is well, I guess the statement. So there is a role for functional medicine in the ED, then, because in my brain, I'm thinking of the ER, like someplace you go acutely for emergent pro emergency room, emergent problems, not your toenail that's you know, hurting you or sniffles. Yeah, ideally, it's these acute issues, but you've seen discussions and focus on functional medicine really improving even those patients in those acute settings too, then.

Dr. Chris Seitz 7:33

Yeah, and and even the even the toenails, I'll say um, you know, even the even the toenail patients, even the patient, I mean, emergency the emergency department has become very much um everyone's entryway to medicine in general. Better or for worse. Right. Supposed to be. I always say, like, man, emergency medicine would be really cool if you only ever saw emergencies, but that's just not the case, right? 90% of what I would see in a day was but but as a part of, and this is this is where I think the functional medicine piece comes in, is that what that all boils down to is education. That's what drew me to medicine. I I'm a I'm a lifelong learner myself. I love to educate. Um, but before you can educate, you have to learn it yourself. So, you know, medicine is about coming alongside people and educating them, whether it's about their body or about their own misconceptions about what's going on. Um, and the emergency department, I mean, I'd have three, four, five patients an hour where I'd have an opportunity to educate them or guide them in something. And we used to tell our residents when I was an attendee, think about if you were on the street today, does that person look normal or healthy to you? Because what happens when you're in the ER all day, you're like, that guy looks fine. But if you saw that guy in the street, you'd be like, oh, whoa, that's that's not a normal looking person, right? You you have a you kind of had to learn to remember what normal people, because you you you switch, you switch a switch, right? You you turn on, you put on your scrubs, you put on your ER badge, and all of a sudden you're you're that clinician and people look different to you because you're looking at them through the new lens. So you had to continuously practice this. Hey, if I saw this person in my living room where they walked through my door, like, would I say that looks normal? But I feel like this person is healthy or not healthy. And maybe it's not an acute emergency, but I'm the I'm the entryway, I'm the person they're coming to to help figure this out. So here's my opportunity to educate, to give a little knowledge, to give some resources, to point them in the right direction. And again, I'll go back to like that that that's functional medicine, right? I mean, that is that is personalized care, that's functional medicine. Maybe I only get to play a small piece of that, right? I don't get to follow them, you know, a ton further, but even finding my space to hold with them and to take that next step with them.

Finding Joy And Avoiding Burnout

Ashley Love 9:44

And interestingly enough, I would imagine, and I don't work in the ER. Um, you said something a second ago that made me giggle, and that was how you enjoyed not knowing what's coming next in life generally. And I think that probably contributed to your enjoyment of the ER, which is why I would not enjoy the ER, especially if you're not thinking about, you know, I like my little clinic schedule of 30 patients. That I would imagine as an ER physician, ER clinician, um, that would really help prevent burnout, is realizing that it's not every, it's not just the acute patients that need your care, right? It's even the patients that come in with maybe a chronic thing that they're just frustrated with today. Um, you can still provide them with that education. You can still surf them as a clinician, um, you know, even if it's not something where you have to begin chest compressions immediately or starting them on all these acute medications. Um, that's a really interesting point. And I love your idea about perspective too. Um, you have to take off your ER glasses sometimes and see people just as, you know, as regular with your regular eyeballs, which it's amazing. If for our non-clinicians who are listening to this, it's the hats. You know, we always talk about the hats that we wear. It's like the brains we put in our head, you know, everything is intertwined at some point, but we definitely we definitely have different roles that we play, which you have a whole nother role, which is entrepreneurship in medicine, which of course we're gonna actually let's talk about that right now. When did you realize you you work in the ER? This is an incredible career. When did you realize or start thinking about shifting and maybe moving into entrepreneurship or even even you know, a new, a new leadership role, really, which is what which is that we have?

Journey Into Travel Medicine

COVID, Telehealth, And New Demand

Why Medical Oversight Matters

Dr. Chris Seitz 11:17

Yeah, I think um it's one of those things that you know you every entrepreneur who's done it and done it successfully, you know, you're here to be like, Oh, I was I think I was always an entrepreneur. It's like it's because when you look back, it's easy to you know to pull that thread through. Um for me, like I don't I wouldn't say I was always an entrepreneur, like I was not that kid who was like, you know, putting up lemonade stands, doing that. Like I I really like I, you know, I I did my chores, I had I had jobs, but it was not really again for me, it it goes back to, and again, this is in hindsight, right? I looked to see where the where those threads were. Um leadership for me was always educating. I always had felt that the best leaders or the leaders that I respected the most knew how to educate really well and were passionate about that, right? Whatever, whatever it was. Um, I'm someone who like you start talking to me about something random, like your your your marketing career, and I've got tons of questions. I I want to know everything. I think it I think it makes me a good CEO because I'm I'm interested in in that. Um so it's really that learning and that education I think drew me to at some point entrepreneurship in the sense that um I've just I've always been very curious. So as I was my my path in the emergency department was interesting. So I I worked uh I did my residency in Detroit area, level one trauma center. I then went and worked at a local community hospital here in the Detroit area um for two years as an attending. That contract got bought out by Team Health, so it got bought out by kind of corporate America, which is not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of people hated that right away. It didn't really bother me. It was again, I was curious about it. I learned a lot about how billing works. I mean, doctors aren't dumb. Like we know that healthcare is a business in the United States, so tell us how to help optimize that. We're happy to, as long as you let us take care of our patients. So I didn't really have an issue with that until it became an issue, right? All of a sudden, efficiency was being put probably before patient care in a lot of cases, and we didn't have quite the voice that we should have. Uh so you know, when it came to re-op the contract for a couple years, I said, Yeah, you know, let me try something different. So I went to travel medicine. Um I was licensed in a couple of licensed in a couple states and I started doing travel medicine. Um, travel medicine now is a very like robust. I mean, this is like a career path that you can start deciding you're gonna take early. When I first did travel medicine, it was the beginning of that. Like we were like probably the first group of physicians like leaving saying, hey, like we're legitimate board certified emergency physicians and we want to try travel medicine, versus like, hey, I lost my license in California and I can only work now in this. That was kind of the doctor persona at the Luddy's. So I would go into these ERs and people would be like very appreciative that I actually knew what I was doing, uh, which was fun. But I but what was cool about that is I got to learn that like the medicine didn't change, but how you delivered the medicine changed based on your resources, based on what you know, what they had or didn't have, you know, who who you had available to you. I worked in emergency departments where I had nurse practitioners that worked under me, and we had level one, you know, we had surgeons and we had vascular surgeons, and then I worked in emergency departments where I was the only doctor in the hospital, like in the whole hospital. There's one point I was working in a rural community up in upper peninsula of Michigan where we had a trauma coming in and a lady was giving, was like gonna give birth upstairs, and they're like, Dr. Sites, like which one do you want? Because you can't do both. Um, but what was cool about that is that you like really learn to to rely on your team, right? I there's just there's you know, people ask me, like, oh, Dr. Sites, like if you were out in the wilderness, you know, like what would you do? Like a CPR? I don't know. I don't have a CT scan, five nurses, and a bunch of other things. I can't really do my job, right? You have to admit that. So um I think that gave me a real great appreciation of the of the team of the health practitioners that I was working with. Um, and then what started happening is that we COVID happened, right? So all of a sudden I was like one of the only doctors working all the time during COVID, going everywhere to help. Um, and that's when we saw this mass exodus of clinicians leaving kind of medicine. Um, we saw advances in telemedicine and technology that allowed for us to do remote, you know, Zoom type of visits. All of a sudden, this this whole digital health thing blew up, and people started asking me, hey Dr. Sice, can you be my medical director for this thing? Could you help me? Could you oversee me here? Could you be my partner with this? Nurse practitioners, PAs, nurses. And I was like, Yeah, I'd love to. This would be awesome, right? First, it was selfishly. I don't have to work as many shifts if I if you pay me to help with that. But uh, but then I realized there was no good resources for that either. There was no, this was a new way of doing medicine that we weren't prepared for. And of course, you know, I was one of the physicians, first physicians coming out during the time where like this focused on the physician shortage has been huge, and you just realized being a practitioner in that ecosystem that man, like this system is broken, and we have to turn to another pool of providers. We have to, it's an inevitability. Unless we empower nurses, nurse practitioners, PAs to pick up a baton and see patients, patients just won't be seen. I can't see more patients in my unit. So that kind of all culminated into well, what if we built a platform to help non-physicians get the oversight that they need, have the compliance tools that they can use to make sure that they're protecting their license, but can deliver care within their scope of practice. And then Guardian Medical Direction was born and kind of took off, and I kept being curious and learning more and found myself in a CEO C one day. So uh that's kind of kind of how that happened.

Ashley Love 16:43

But it's incredible. It's incredible. Say let's talk a little bit about medical oversight because that's something that you mentioned that I think people have heard, but they might they might not understand what that is. Why is it why is it such a barrier for us in healthcare right now? What well first what is it? And then why is it a barrier?

Building Guardian Medical Direction

Dr. Chris Seitz 17:00

Yeah. So I mean, again, when you think about traditional medicine, when you're when you're a nurse working in a hospital, you just naturally have physicians who are putting your orders in. You have, you know, you have this hierarchy of oversight um that just this just kind of naturally happens. That disappears when you go out into the outpatient world. So when we saw these advances in telemedicine, you know, ability to do telemedicine stuff, um, with doctors not being very accessible, all of a sudden become, okay, well, I'm a nurse, maybe I want to start my own ID hydration clinic. Maybe I want to do aesthetics, you know, do some med spot stuff. Maybe I'm a nurse practitioner and I'm I'm gonna start my own telemedicine practice. But how do you do that without the right medical oversight in place that mimics that hierarchy in the hospital? And there, and there really has not been a way to do it. So, what happened was that practitioners would have to find a doctor like myself who was curious and somewhat familiar with these things and say, hey, can can you help me figure out what forms I gotta file with the state board? Can you help me figure out how to register this business even? Can I can I do this? Is it am I allowed to do this? The boards are very silent sometimes. They they expect us to interpret what the rules are and they just hold us accountable if we get it wrong. Um, so it can be very scary. And I think especially in in the the booming digital health medical entrepreneurship world that kind of came out of COVID, unfortunately, but not surprisingly, like protecting the clinicians is kind of the last thing on the list, right? It's first like let's make money, then let's figure out how to show outcomes. So I'm businesses die right there, right? I've made a lot of money with this new thing, but it doesn't actually help people in the end of the research. And then if you can get to the point where it actually does help people and I can prove that concept that I'm making money, then and only then do they worry about like, well, how do I make sure my physicians and my nurses and my nurse practitioners are satisfied? And a lot of people feel they're too. I think I felt that it needed to be done differently, right? How do we protect the clinicians first? If you protect protect clinicians first and give them the tools, they will do what they do best, which is drive outcomes. And if you drive outcomes, you can make money in medicine. The problem is that the money came in the third step in my scenario, not the first. So it's uh not something that everybody follows. But um, but yeah, so so what we do is that we have nurses, nurse practitioners, PAs that come to us and say, Hey, I want to start my own medical business. How do I do that? How do I do it the right way, where I protect my license? How do I who do I need to partner with? How do I structure this? And we kind of help them from A to Z do that. So we we have a platform that provides uh the other side of that equation, like physicians to do that oversight. Uh, we help them draft their protocols and procedures that qualify for state board to approve so that they can legally do it. We help them structure the business. Uh certain things that people don't realize we're like certain states, a nurse can't own the practice of medicine, only a physician can. So we'll help establish that relationship with the right contracts to again protect both sides of that. We always say, like, let us help you kind of structure it the right way, get it done in a way that you are safe and can go to sleep and I know your license is protected, then go scale your business, right? And if we do it that way, I think. And it it's it's still a model that like people are uncomfortable with sometimes. The boards are still trying to figure out how do we do this where we're like, we really as a company have partnered with these boards to say, hey, let us help you show you how to do it the right way so that these clinicians can do it. But there is no other choice. And I think that's what we're coming coming to find year over year that we have to adopt and change and figure out how to do this because otherwise we just have to admit that patients won't have access, which I don't think is an option anybody wants.

Ashley Love 20:39

No, it's not an option. You're absolutely right. And you, gosh, that was incredible. Thank you for explaining all of that. And that is there's three different points that I want to touch on first. And the the first one is um I know we mentioned we were gonna come back to the fact that you're licensed in all 50 states. First of all, is that unusual? That's unusual, right? Not not every physician is licensed in all 50 states.

Dr. Chris Seitz 20:59

No, that is unusual. So that's one of the actually kind of cool things that again that came out of COVID and telemedicine. It's called the IMLCC. IMLCC. It's a way that I as a doctor can get like one license and then quickly get licensed in a bunch of other states. That didn't exist before. Like that's kind of an unheard of thing. Even when I was first coming up in telemedicine and and travel medicine, was how do you get a license in multiple spots that you have the ability to help more? Um, now that's it's much more doable. We're speaking nurse compact licenses in the same way, right? But the problem with that is that as you the way I practice what I'm allowed to do through the state of Ohio's Board of Medicine is not exactly the same as the state of Michigan. And that's something that people don't really understand. Your scope of practice is different per state. Um again, that's another thing that these entrepreneurs have to navigate as they're starting their medical businesses, especially if you're gonna like open up multiple locations or do telemedicine across state lines. The different compliance components are different in every state.

Licensure, Compacts, And Scope

Ashley Love 21:59

Well, thank you. For explaining that. And that was actually the question I was going to ask you is that number one, I would imagine being licensed in all 50 states makes you beautifully positioned to counsel people, of course, medical professionals in all 50 states. But it's also a really great point to make for the student who might, or even the patient who might not realize that just because I'm board certified and licensed in Florida doesn't mean that while I'm on vacation in California, I could just work for a couple of weeks. You know, it's just that's not how medicine is currently positioned, which is interesting to see. And I think something to keep our eye on, and maybe you can speak to this too, over the next maybe decade in medicine, is really seeing those lines blurred, especially as we run into more issues with um, you know, a limited number of clinicians, specifically medical doctors. Um that'll be quite interesting. So thank you. Thank you for explaining that so well. That's such an important point that we don't bring up very often. And then something else that I wanted to mention is um, you know, this entrepreneurship in medicine. I think a lot of people think about it as doctors, MDs, or DOs. What I'm hearing you say is that entrepreneurs is not limited to medical doctors. It is for nurses, for PAs, for NPs. Is that this is true? This is news.

Nurse And PA Entrepreneurship

Dr. Chris Seitz 23:14

Yeah, yeah. Our whole business, we so we don't support physician practices. We support nurse-run businesses and PAs as well. Um, so these are nurses, nurse practitioners, you know, RNs, nurse practitioners, PAs, um, even just medical entrepreneurs who are gonna hire those types of people to deliver care who have a good business idea on how to deliver care in a unique way, they come to us and we help them build it the right way. Now you need physician oversight in there. That's that's why our model exists. You need to structure the business in the correct way. You have to have the right policies, procedures, protocols. There are certain things you can do that if you hire these kind of practitioners, there are certain things you can't. And that might be different in what state you're in. I mean, to your point, it's it's something that people don't realize is that if I'm a doctor on vacation in Florida and I respond to a medical emergency, I'm responding as a layperson. I don't have a license there to actually practice. You have to be very careful. Versus if I'm at, you know, the store and someone goes down, you hear these stories of, you know, especially ER doctors, we like to be, I don't know, we like to get on the news apparently, but um, we're like, you know, someone, you know, we're working out of the gym and someone goes down and like some rant, and again, whoever this guy is, right? You've heard this story, but whoever this guy who's who's like carrying his medical bag and like who is that guy on scene? Like, first of all, dude, why I mean come on, you were looking for that to happen. Whatever, that's fine. Uh, you know, you deal with your own ego at home, I guess. But uh anyway, elancipate the guy, they'll get him and they'll save his life. That's awesome. If they're licensed in that state, if you were like on vacation and did that as an year doctor, you were licensed, like you get sued pretty severely. Like, you don't have and people don't know that they think one's a doctor, always a doctor, which is true. But I'm certified, I'm licensed in a specific state. So, yeah, I got licensed in all 50 states. It took a long time, it cost a lot of money, but uh, like I said, I I can kind of do what I want a little bit uh in that way, but that's not the norm. And a lot of people don't don't realize that. But yeah, going back to your initial question, yes, I mean, so this is all nurse entrepreneurship, PA entrepreneurship. Like we and this is again, this is what I think is an inevitability in healthcare. The act, you know, my emergency department used to be everyone's access point. Now people are accessing medicine at their gym, at their pharmacy, at their medical spa. I think that's awesome. I think a lot of people are afraid of that. And I think the regulatory environment is like, oh my gosh, how do we do that? How do we make sure because you hear all the bad stories? But to me, like I built a business to help support that the right way because to me that's very exciting. I'd really love patients to be able to get care wherever makes the most sense for them. I think we'll see people take care of themselves better that way. I think we will be able to take that burden off of the current healthcare system if we can do it right.

Access Anywhere, Done Safely

Ashley Love 26:00

I just I want to repeat this because I think that this is such a novel idea to hear a medical doctor saying, and that is get your medical care from what's accessible to you and what and what feels comfortable to you. But at the same time, coming from someone who's founded Guardian Medical Direction, find out what is backing them. Find out where they're getting their opinions from, where they're getting their advice from. You still have to do your research. Like, you know, you still have to know about this person or this company. And that's where this is so incredible that you have offered an amazing resource to these clinicians, these nurses, PAs, and Ps who are who really desperately want to offer care, but maybe need some support there, right?

Dr. Chris Seitz 26:47

Yeah. I think clinicians too, I mean, we talk a lot about burnout. Um, I think clinicians are burnt out, not because they're seeing too many patients. I really don't. I don't think I wasn't burnt out in the emergency department because of all the patients I was seeing. I got burnt out in the emergency department because I couldn't deliver care the way I knew I wanted to deliver care.

Ashley Love 27:06

Right.

Burnout As A Systems Problem

Dr. Chris Seitz 27:07

Right. So, like that's the other thing that I think that I hope that we empower at Guardian is that again, like if you got a business idea, like you got a way you want to deliver care to your group of patients or your community, man, I want to help you do that. Because, like, one, you're going to be able to give so much more and you're not going to burn out because you get to do it your way. Again, let's just make sure it's in the confines of the right compliance safety network to do it, you know. But um, but that's it's it's it's it's it's less hard than people realize. You know, so it's like you just have to understand it. Um, but yeah, I I think that I really bullish on all the new advances in medicine. I think there's a I think there's doctors out there that are getting worried. I feel the opposite way. I really think we're entering a time where, you know, for physicians who are worried about, you know, losing some of the control, I think that we as doctors finally get back to being true scientists and pioneers and thought leaders. We can empower more people that actually deliver care in the way that best suits them and best suits their community. We talk about personalized care all the time, right? Um, so why would we not want to help people figure out what, again, to your point, what works best for them, right?

Ashley Love 28:14

Absolutely. And you know, here's a question. We've been dancing around this question the whole time, and I'm just gonna ask it directly. Where do you see healthcare heading in the next well, I pick it pick a number, 10, 20 years? What is it gonna look like? How is it gonna look different than what we are poorly sometimes doing right now?

The Next Decade With AI

Dr. Chris Seitz 28:32

So I think, I mean, we gotta start talking, we gotta start talking about AI. We talk about feature of healthcare here. I think that AI is going to do a really good job of taking over all the algorithm-based. It's gonna have to be done with the right oversight in place, right? It we can't just rely on, you know, uh just the technology, right? There needs to be the checks and balances, which I think we as physicians are gonna continue to move into more oversight roles. We're gonna continue to move into more kind of guidance. You know, they say 30% of physicians today have a non-traditional role. It's awesome. And that's because a lot of them are entering into chief medical officer, medical director. Like, we kind of have to elevate up and empower the you know, the other practitioners to do some of that work. I think AI starts to really help take care of a lot of the easy, quick things. And to me, that's not scary. That doesn't take jobs away. That actually allows us as clinicians to get back to being healers. I don't have to be the guy checking all the boxes, making sure the stroke protocol. I can be the guy who sits with you, who holds your hand and says, Man, I get why this isn't exactly right for you. Let's work together to figure out what that is. That's to me super exciting. I think I we talk about the science of medicine. The science of medicine is those algorithms, right? It's the ACLS protocol, it's your stroke protocols, it's it's you know, make sure you give this antibiotic before this antibiotic. And that science changes based on research. And as we the art of medicine to me is the environments that we create for healing. And that can be an environment that I create with you right here, where we're just speaking on a phone and I and I sit with you as a healer and like make that space for you. It can be the environment I create in my medical spa, right? When you come in and you feel a certain way when you get that experience with like I think the the experiences, that's the art of medicine to me. I think that's where we're gonna be able to, as clinicians, get back to a lot of that. And I think we're gonna see massive leaps in people's health because of that, though. Not because the science is gonna get better or faster or quicker, like the strep throat's gonna be strep throat, it's gonna be strep throat. Hey, I can handle that. Right. We're gonna start to be able to create environments again for healing, and that was where we're gonna see this kind of revolution of health advancements. Um that's my that's my prediction. That's my hope.

Ashley Love 30:48

I love it. What a fantastic, fantastic idea too, would be to you know, get take, put the healer back in the healing, right? I I I I love that. And it does feel more, um, it feels more collaborative with the patient as well. And I think that we have so often just spoken to the patient instead of spoken with the patient. And I think that's also part of the art of medicine, right? Um, oh my gosh, incredible. Okay, last question as we wrap up. I'm just taking up so much of your time. Um let's talk to our let's talk to our student right now. How should students begin thinking about the business side of medicine? And should they be thinking about the business side of medicine before they even go into it, right? They're they're they're thinking right now, well, Ash, I'm not even not even there yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, is this a good time to start considering it in the current climate?

Putting The Healer Back In Healing

Student Mindset And Business Basics

Dr. Chris Seitz 31:36

I think so obviously, I think yes, right. I think that every clinician should be thinking, and but when I say business, I guess I go back to entrepreneurship. And we throw that term around very loosely nowadays. Everyone's an entrepreneur, right? You sell pottery out of your garage, you're an entrepreneur, and that's fine. The term entrepreneur, though, like really came from this like creating something from nothing, though. Like an entrepreneur back in the day was someone who like created something that didn't exist before. And that's because it's interpersonal and it's interrelational, right? So I guess when I say yes, I think what I'm saying is I'm gonna encourage whether you're pre-med or pre-nursing or in these different environments, is to just don't get concerned that you're not gonna be able to do it your way. And obviously, like I said, your way needs to drive value, but it will because you wouldn't be in it if you weren't caring, you didn't want to care for people if that wasn't just a natural thing. So just stay curious around like, hey, I really like that path over there, but I would want to do it a little different, or man, I it'd be really cool if you did. Like, those are all options. And like when I went through medical school and I went through like people didn't tell you that, right? You can be an air doctor, you can be an OBGYN, you can feel like that's a doctor, and that's it. You better pick the right one because heaven forbid it's really hard to switch, you can't do another residency. Like that was kind of the what we were taught. I have not found that to be true at all. I I think what one of the best you know things about the career that I chose is that I get to make it up every I can I can make up every day a different way of doing what I'm trained to do and find new passion or new excitement or uh just get creative anytime. And if I want to go sit and just see patients all day in telemedicine, I can pick up the phone, I can get that job tomorrow as well. I mean, it's really such a blessing to have that the skill set to really just, you know, they say that they say the true marker of success is waking up and getting to choose your own problems. I get to choose my own problems, right? What I want to struggle with is what I get to struggle with. And that is the most freeing thing. I think clinicians are very uniquely positioned for that in what we do, and especially with what's coming in the future. Like, I I would just encourage people, like, just keep being curious about it. Don't get overwhelmed by it, don't worry about it. Like, it's all on the table for you. And that's I think just absolutely incredible.

Ashley Love 34:06

Dr. Seites, thank you so much. Listen, if you guys are interested in learning more about um about Guardian Medical Direction, check it out. It's guardianmedicaldirection.com. Dr. Sites, it has been absolutely incredible. I am so full of hope, really, about medicine, about the trajectory of medicine, and um and very, very grateful for what you have offered.

Dr. Chris Seitz 34:28

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Closing And Resources

Ashley Love 34:30

Thank you so very much for listening to this episode of Shadow Me Next. If you liked this episode, or if you think it could be useful for a friend, please subscribe and invite them to join us next Monday. As always, if you have any questions, let me know on Facebook or Instagram. Access you want, stories you need, you're always invited to Shadow Me Next. Please keep in mind that the content of this podcast is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only, and should not be considered as professional medical advice. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.