AI and employment law: Why small practices may stand to benefit

For smaller medical practices, artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is likely to occur largely behind the scenes, with limited public reporting of layoffs, and may offer cost savings as companies target industries with tools designed to automate tasks and potentially replace lower-level roles. At the same time, many independent physicians are early adopters of AI for administrative and research tasks, using it to support, but not replace, their own clinical judgment and business decision-making. Here are reasons why small practices could benefit, said Christopher S. Mayer, J.D., an employment law specialist with the firm Frier Levitt.

Medical Economics: There’s a dichotomy that takes place in health care, where you have hands-on work with patients, and then a lot of head work that involves physicians and other clinicians getting the education, the training, experience, to recognize conditions. We're already seeing how AI is being used as a tool to supplement that head work.

Christopher S. Mayer, J.D.: Yeah, and I think for small providers, you're not necessarily going to see a lot of public results and layoffs and things like that. What is going to happen is, it's going to be more behind the scenes. And I think small providers may benefit more from the transition into the AI world, as much as anyone. We're seeing that with, say, Anthropic and other generative AI companies. When they go in, they target an industry. More recently, I think it was ChatGPT did this in the investment banking world. They created a training run, as they call it, to basically replace junior investment bankers. And so as these, these companies focus on what they can do and what they can replace, they're making a lot of existing software tools, or eventually they're expected to, and that's why we're seeing a huge impact on the software industry in general, obsolete, they'll be able to provide similar, maybe even superior, software tools at a much reduced cost. And I think a small provider could certainly benefit from that.

But what I'm seeing is that small providers are also early adopters of AI usage, just in their general life, and I think that's in part because if you're a physician running a small practice, it's just like anyone who runs a small business, you got to do everything. You may have accounting people, you may have finance people, but you're hands on, and you've got to be in that. And so I'm seeing those folks doing a lot of a lot of the outside work, a lot of the administrative work, using AI. And it doesn't mean they're accepting it as a panacea, or that the answers that they're getting from Ai they're accepting is accurate, always, I think they're just starting to adopt it and use it to make research things and make some decisions.