Dr. Patrick Oben

Physician founder building AI-powered healthcare systems, products, and patient experiences. Entrepreneur. Minister. Husband. Dad.

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

The AI wrote a perfect note.
The patient said that’s not what I said.
I was finishing a visit in the facility. The ambient draft was already on the screen.
It said:
“Patient denies pain. Mood is stable. Agrees with plan.”
I read it back, just to check.
She shook her head.
“Doctor, I didn’t say I have no pain. I said I’m used to it.”
Then she pointed at the last line.
“And I didn’t agree. I said I’ll try.”
Those two sentences are not the same.
One belongs in a note that looks clean.
The other is what actually happened in the room.
I almost signed the clean version.
This is the part of AI in clinic that nobody puts in the demo.
The model is fluent.
The patient is precise.
The physician is the only one who can tell which sentence is true.
#PhysicianLife #PatientExperience #ClinicalAI #PhysicianBuilders #Geriatrics #LongTermCare

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

My patient corrected my medical terminology… then told me to stop using big medical words. 😂

I was rounding today and met a resident I needed to ask about urinary symptoms.

Trying to keep things simple, I asked:

“Do you have any trouble controlling your pee?”

He looked at me and immediately corrected me:

“Doctor, that’s not the right word. The word is incontinence.”

😂

I said, “Well, thank you for that.”

We kept talking.

A little later, I told him:

“You’ll need to see a urologist.”

He stopped me again.

“Doctor, don’t use that. That’s a big word. You don’t need to use big words like that. What is a urologist?”

😂😂😂

So apparently incontinence is perfectly acceptable…

but urologist is where we draw the line.

One of the things I love about medicine: our patients will keep us humble—and sometimes make our day.

#Medicine #PhysicianLife #PatientCare #HealthcareHumor #Geriatrics #LongTermCare #PatientExperience

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

AI will change healthcare--but there's one thing it cannot change.

It will write our notes.
Help us diagnose disease.
Recommend treatments.
Monitor patients.
And take over much of the clerical work we do today.

But there is one thing AI cannot replace:

Human presence.

Because healthcare is not just another service industry.
Healthcare is different from every other service industry.

At its core, it is one human being caring for another human being during some of the most important and vulnerable moments of human existence.

The eye contact.
The touch.
The trust.
The feeling that someone actually cares.

AI will become an extraordinary tool in healthcare.

But the heart of healthcare will remain human.

#Healthcare #AIinHealthcare #ArtificialIntelligence #PatientExperience #HumanConnection #DigitalHealth #FutureOfHealthcare

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

One of the bitter lessons I had to learn as a doctor: money matters in healthcare.

For years, I thought talking about money somehow contaminated the purity of patient care.

I was wrong.

When I finished internal medicine residency and started working as a young hospitalist, I believed patient care was everything.

And whenever money came up, I was uncomfortable.

Why are we talking about money? This is about patients.

I still believe patient care is the priority.

But I was making a mistake:

I thought that because money should not be the priority, it did not matter.

Then I became the hospitalist director of a regional hospital.

Suddenly, I began seeing the financial consequences of decisions physicians make every day.

I remember one case vividly.

One of our hospitalists forgot to enter an observation order.

It seemed like a small administrative oversight.

It wasn’t.

Nearly $20,000 of the hospital stay was denied by insurance.

The reaction was essentially: “I just forgot to put in the order.”

Yes.

But that forgotten order cost the hospital almost $20,000.

That was an eye-opener for me.

Then I watched our CEO and CFO wrestle with the very real challenge of keeping a regional hospital financially healthy.

The lights have to stay on.

Nurses have to be paid.

Physicians have to be paid.

Equipment, medications, and supplies have to be available.

The doors have to remain open for the next patient.

And I began to understand something much bigger:

In the United States, you will never fully understand healthcare until you understand money and how it flows.

Healthcare can seem mysterious and unnecessarily complicated until you begin to understand who pays whom, what gets reimbursed, what gets denied, where the money goes, and how those resources are stewarded.

Money is not the purpose of healthcare.

But healthcare cannot function without it.

And this lesson is not just for physicians.

Everyone involved in healthcare—clinicians, administrators, executives, insurers, policymakers—has to put money in its proper place.

Some parts of healthcare risk making money the ultimate goal.

Physicians can make the opposite mistake: dismissing money altogether because we are rightly focused on the patient.

Both are mistakes.

The challenge is this:

Not money above the patient.
Not money instead of the patient.
But money properly understood and stewarded in service of the patient.

Patient care must remain the mission.

But if we want better healthcare, better patient experience, and sustainable systems of care, we cannot afford to ignore the money.

#Healthcare #PhysicianLeadership #PatientExperience #HealthcareLeadership #HealthEconomics #Doctors #HospitalMedicine

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

What changes when healthcare truly meets seniors where they live?

Here’s a quick look at what Curana Health is—and why our focused, on-site clinical care matters to senior living communities.

#CuranaHealth #SeniorLiving #Healthcare #SeniorCare #ValueBasedCare #ClinicalCare

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

Don’t mess with the nurses’ space!

After more than 10 years in hospital medicine and over three years in long-term care, I’ve become convinced of one thing:

Nurses are the glue that holds our healthcare system together.

I saw that again today at Care Initiatives Corydon Specialty Care.

Every member of the healthcare team matters. But nurses are there hour after hour—coordinating care, catching problems, answering families, carrying out the plan, and keeping everything moving.

Remove that glue, and the system quickly starts coming apart.

And yet, nurses are probably among the most underappreciated people in healthcare.

So this is simply to say:

Thank you, nurses. We see what you do. And we appreciate you.

#Nursing #Nurses #Healthcare #LongTermCare #HealthcareLeadership #SkilledNursing #CuranHealth #CareInitiatives

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

Grok. Wow.
Grok Bot. Wow, wow.
Grok Build. Wow, wow, wow.
Been running Grok 4.6 hard in Grok Build for a couple of weeks.
Just discovered Grok Bot 2–3 days ago.
The speed is insane.
The quality of the work is now right up there with ChatGPT, GPT-5.6, and Fable 5 for the work I do.
Just cut my Claude Code from $200 → $100.
Keeping the ChatGPT $200 plan for now.
Locked in SuperGrok Heavy on the $99 promo (normally $300).
Never running out of credits.
I suspect Elon Musk is probably going to win this AI battle.
#Grok #Grok46 #GrokBuild #GrokBot #xAI #ElonMusk #AI #AgenticAI

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

Most doctors still think AI is a chatbot.

That’s the mistake.

AI now has hands.

The last generation of doctors let others design the EHR. We’re still paying for it.

If we do the same with AI, the price will be higher.

Be in the room.
Will physicians completely lose control of the practice of medicine or will AI engineers( and those who fund them) ultimately take over??

#MedTwitter #AIinHealthcare #HealthTech #Physician #ArtificialIntelligence

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

The biggest opportunity in healthcare AI may not be AI replacing physicians.
It may be AI finally giving physicians the power to build.

For decades, we have lived inside broken workflows and frustrating software. We know where care fails, where information gets lost, where patients struggle, and where technology creates more work instead of less.

Physicians already bring what great healthcare software requires:
→ Knowledge to understand the problem
→ Expertise to know what good care demands
→ Experience to see where systems fail in the real world
→ Skill to design better clinical workflows
→ Judgment to know when a solution is unsafe or simply wrong

What we lacked was the ability to turn those assets into working software without a large engineering team.

That barrier is disappearing.
Vibe coding showed us we can describe what we want in natural language and have AI agents help build it. But we are already moving past it.

I prefer the term AI Building and I define it as the practice of using natural language, structured product thinking, and AI agents to design, build, validate, and improve real software products.

Vibe coding generates software through conversation. AI Building is broader — it directs AI specialists through the full arc: defining the problem, designing the solution, planning, building, testing, reviewing, launching, improving.

I have been developing my own system for this — AI Builders OS. It lets me operate as an AI Build Director while AI agents work as specialists at each stage. I plan to make it public soon.
The principle is simple: the human directs, the AI specializes.
I do not need to become a software engineer. My contribution is clinical knowledge, experience, judgment, and understanding of the problem. AI provides the technical execution.

That changes who gets to build the future of healthcare.
A physician can turn a broken workflow into a tool.
A nurse can redesign clinical handoffs.
A pharmacist can build better medication-safety systems.
A researcher can create the exact workflow a study requires.
An operator can automate what has frustrated teams for years.
And it will touch nearly everything: documentation, EHR workflows, patient education, chronic disease management, care coordination, research, quality improvement, prevention, and care between visits.
Not because AI understands healthcare better than we do.
Because we can finally turn what we know into software.
The next generation of healthcare technology will not only be built for clinicians.
It will be built by clinicians.

#AIinHealthcare #AIBuilding #PhysicianBuilder #HealthTech #VibeCoding

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

I never thought this would happen with the way I use computers.

This weekend, I decided to start using the terminal exclusively for all my AI building and agentic work — no more Claude Code or ChatGPT desktop apps as my default. Something changed. Here's the story.

When I first started learning basic computer and dev work, I hated the terminal so much that I warned my AI agents never to send me there. I was comfortable with graphical interfaces and I loved desktop apps.

What I didn't know was what I was giving up.

But as my vibe coding work exploded, I ran straight into the limits of depending on desktop apps. My computer froze more often. Everything got slower. Then three things happened that pushed me to the terminal for good.

1. Elon Musk forced me to use it! Not literally. But when Grok 4.6 released, it was so good at coding that I wanted it badly — and its coding agent ( Grok Build) only runs in the terminal. I was stuck. I had to go back,

and that's when I realized: with AI agents at your side, the terminal is a completely different experience.

2. I stumbled on a piece of software called @cmux. It's a special kind of terminal that lets you work on

multiple projects and tasks at the same time, with notifications for each one. This was exactly what I

had been looking for. Since the weekend, I've set aside my Claude Code and Codex desktop apps and only

open them occasionally. cmux terminal is now my default. Unbelievable — for me!

3. I finally understood why pro coders live in the terminal. It's faster. It bypasses the headaches of

working through an app. It makes building faster, not slower. I used to wonder why developers preferred

this "ugly" terminal over a polished desktop app. Now I know. I've become one of them.

And the first thing I did with my new terminal habit? Clean up my Mac. I couldn't believe how much junk

was sitting on it — inactive programs quietly eating up space. Instead of rushing to buy a machine with

more RAM, the terminal let me optimize the one I have and recover close to 100GB.

This is an exciting journey, and it's just beginning.

Have any of you — coders or non-coders — tried cmux? I'd love to hear your experience.

#AI #AIAgents #VibeCoding #BuildInPublic #AIBuilding #PhysicianEntrepreneur

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

It teaches you while you build the actual thing you need.

That's the whole unlock.

What would you build if the skills were no longer the barrier?

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

I have more than 50 AI agents working for me.

They run my clinic, my ministry, my content, and my code.

I didn't hire one. I built them all with Codex and Claude Code.

I'm a physician who can't write a line of code.

Here's what they built, and what each replaced:

#AIBuilders #PhysicianEntrepreneur #AIInHealthcare

[Dr. Patrick Oben @patrickoben]

I never became an engineer. I became an AI build director.

And you can do the same.

No degree. No bootcamp. No $2,000 course sitting half-finished in a browser tab.

AI taught me more in a few months than 95% of courses ever could.