242: Becker's 2026 Debrief: Competing with Wayne Gretzky (and winning), What Happens When Patients' AI Agents Start Talking to Yours, and The Most Interesting Ideas We Heard

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In this special solo episode, hosts Joshua Liu, MD and Alan look back on their trip to Chicago for Becker's 2026 Annual IT + RCM Conference. They share the week's adventures, their first in-person Digital Patient meetup, and their own experiments with AI agents. They also go through standout ideas from speakers at Ochsner, Rush, Northwestern and more: why a human in the loop isn't enough, the burnout risk of practicing at the top of your license, why pilots don't automatically scale, why healthcare needs to get better at turning technology off, and more... Click the play button to listen or read the show notes below.
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Audio:

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Guest(s):

• Joshua Liu, MD (@joshuapliu), Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD

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‍Episode 242 - Show Notes:

[00:00:14] What Becker's 2026 looked like this year

[00:02:25] How the Hilton Chicago venue made the conference hard to navigate

[00:03:50] How the trip got off to a rocky start

[00:09:18] How Josh uses Gemini

[00:10:43] Why booth placement matters from the vendor side

[00:14:56] What happened at the first in-person Digital Patient podcast meetup, which was scheduled against Wayne Gretzky's fireside chat

[00:17:01] Why many attendees come to Becker's every two or three years

[00:17:46] The forward-thinking thought leaders at the conference

[00:18:56] What using Meta's Muse agent is actually like

[00:24:44] How AI agents could enable a 10,000-patient primary care panel without burning out physicians

[00:28:00] Why a human in the loop isn't enough

[00:29:57] How Josh uses Claude to pattern-match his interview scoring

[00:33:15] What gives away AI-generated writing

[00:34:48] Why what gets you through a pilot won't get you to scale

[00:36:30] Why healthcare must get better at turning technology off

[00:38:53] Why "a hospital stay isn't like the Four Seasons"

[00:40:37] The hospital meal that arrived minutes before discharge

[00:41:25] How generational preferences are reshaping care modalities

[00:44:11] What the hosts took away from Chicago this year

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