Every week there’s a new tool promising to run your front desk, write your emails, and read your reviews while you sleep. Some of them are genuinely good. Some of them are a data leak with a pricing page. You don’t need to become technical to tell the difference — you need five questions, asked in order, and the discipline to walk away if the answers wobble.
This is the checklist I run before any tool goes near a practice I work with. It’s also the checklist I hold my own builds to, so if you ever consider hiring me, ask me these same five. That’s the point of writing them down.
1. Where does patient data go?
If a tool touches anything a patient told you — names, appointments, conditions, even the fact that someone is a patient — it’s handling protected health information. A vendor that’s serious about healthcare will sign a business associate agreement and say plainly where data is stored and whether it trains their models. A vendor that changes the subject has answered the question.
The everyday version of this matters more: free consumer chatbots are not business tools. A useful rule of thumb — if you wouldn’t write it on a postcard, don’t paste it into a free chatbot.
2. Who approves what it sends?
The right shape for AI in a practice is draft → review → send. A human reads every message before a patient does. Tools that fire messages automatically are selling you speed at the price of judgment, and judgment is the thing your patients are actually paying for. If a tool can’t put your staff between the draft and the send button, it doesn’t belong in a practice.
3. Can your front desk run it without the person who bought it?
Most practices already have systems that live in one staffer’s head — that’s why follow-up dies when that person takes a vacation. Don’t buy a tool that recreates the same failure with a login screen. Before you commit, have the least technical person on your team drive it for ten minutes. If they can’t, the tool’s real cost is their frustration plus your dependence on whoever set it up.
4. Does it sound like you?
Read one of its drafts out loud. If it could have come from any practice in town, it’s not saving you work — it’s spending your reputation. Generic is expensive for a business built on relationships. The better tools let you teach them your voice with your own writing; the best process keeps a human deciding whether the draft earned your name at the bottom. (There’s a whole guide on this: why your practice shouldn’t sound like ChatGPT.)
5. What happens the day you cancel?
Ask before you sign: can you export your data, your templates, your history? Does anything you built inside the tool leave with you? Subscription software has a quiet gravity — the longer you stay, the harder leaving gets. A fair vendor makes the exit boring. My own version of this principle: everything I build belongs to the practice, and I train the front desk to run it without me. Any vendor can be held to the same standard.
The honest close
A tool that passes all five questions is worth a trial. Most won’t pass all five, and that’s the checklist working. You are allowed to be picky — you’re the one whose name is on the door.
Disagree with any of this, or vetting a specific tool and want a second opinion? Write to me — that’s a real offer, not a funnel. Or head back to the Classroom.