Day one of The National in Orlando is done, and one of our team was in the building. The expo ran its full nine hours, the opening reception filled the hall at five, and the session people kept mentioning afterwards was not a clinical one. It was about running the office.
This is a report on what that session actually covered, what it says about where chiropractic practice management is heading, and what a practice owner who was not in Orlando can take from it this week. Two more days remain, and our notes from them will follow.
Table of Contents
The Session Everyone Kept Mentioning
Dr. Jennifer Bonde's course, "Becoming the Modern CEO: Using AI to Lead Your Team, Manage Your Practice, and Deliver Exceptional Patient Care," was billed as a two-hour interactive session in the AI in healthcare track. What made it stand out on day one had little to do with the title.
It was a working session, not a talk
Attendees did not watch slides about the future of artificial intelligence. They sat with ChatGPT, Claude and custom GPT tools open and built things during the session: standard operating procedures, staff communication systems, delegation frameworks, practice policies and codes of conduct.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A presentation about AI leaves you with opinions. A working session leaves you with a draft SOP on your laptop, and a draft is something a practice can actually finish on Monday. It is the difference between coming home from a conference with notes and coming home with work already started, and very few sessions anywhere manage the second.
Why the framing was "CEO" rather than "AI"
The premise of the course was not that AI is impressive. It was that most practice owners are doing three jobs, clinician, manager and leader, and the middle one is the one drowning them. The tools were presented as a way to get the manager job done in less time, so the other two get what is left of the day. That is a chiropractic practice management argument first and a technology argument second, which is probably why the room took it seriously.
What AI Changes in Chiropractic Practice Management
The concrete outputs the session focused on are worth listing, because none of them are futuristic and all of them are the unglamorous paperwork that never gets done.
The documents practices never write
- Standard operating procedures. Every practice has processes. Almost none have them written down, which is why the front desk runs differently every time someone is on holiday.
- Delegation frameworks. Who decides what, and what gets escalated. The absence of this is why every small question still reaches the owner.
- Staff communication systems. What gets communicated where, so the team is not run through hallway conversations and sticky notes.
- Policies and codes of conduct. The documents nobody enjoys writing and everyone needs the day something goes wrong.
The reason these never get written is not ignorance, it is that they take hours a practice owner does not have. That is precisely the kind of work a language model compresses: you describe how your office actually runs, it produces the structured first draft, and you correct it. The judgment stays yours. The typing does not.
The first draft is the unlock
One detail from our attendee's notes is worth underlining. The session did not claim AI produces finished documents. It produces first drafts fast enough that the finishing actually happens. Anyone who has stared at a blank page understands why that changes the economics of chiropractic practice management: the cost of starting drops to nearly nothing, and starting was always the expensive part.
There is a compounding effect hiding in this, too. The first SOP is the hardest because you are also deciding what an SOP looks like in your practice. The second one borrows the format of the first, the third takes twenty minutes, and somewhere around the fifth the practice has something it has never had before, which is an operations manual that actually matches how the office runs. No single document justifies the effort. The library does.
The Tools That Were Actually Named
The session worked with general tools, ChatGPT, Claude and custom GPTs, and also discussed platforms that sit closer to the clinical workflow: Heidi Health, ChiroTouch and Jane App were raised as examples of AI and EHR integration.
Two different categories, two different decisions
It is worth keeping these separate. General language models are cheap, immediate, and touch no patient data if you use them properly. EHR-integrated platforms are a procurement decision: they carry contracts, migration costs and compliance questions, and switching later is expensive.
Naming a platform here is reporting, not endorsement. If an exhibitor pitched you one of these on the floor this week, the questions from our guide on what to ask before signing with any vendor or agency apply in full: what does it cost to run in year two, and who is already using it that you can speak to.
The cost asymmetry is the practical point. Trying the general tools on one document this week costs an evening and roughly the price of a coffee. An integrated platform costs a contract. The sensible order is obvious once it is stated, and yet plenty of practices will leave Orlando this week having done it backwards, signed on the floor and figured out the workflow later.
💡 Pro Tip
A useful rule from the session, worth adopting verbatim: draft operational documents with general AI tools that never see patient data, and treat anything touching the clinical record as a separate, slower, compliance-first decision.
Get my free video ad →Where the Session Said Not to Use AI
The most credible part of the course, by our attendee's account, was the part about boundaries. HIPAA compliance, patient-data privacy and the appropriate limits of AI inside a healthcare practice were an explicit section of the session, not a disclaimer at the end.
The line in one sentence
Use AI to remove administrative and operational work. Keep clinical responsibility and clinical judgment with the practitioner. Nothing that touches a diagnosis, a treatment decision or identifiable patient data goes into a general-purpose tool, and anything ambiguous is a question for your compliance advisor rather than a thing to work out from a conference session or, for that matter, from a blog post.
Why the boundary makes the rest usable
A session that promised AI could do everything would have been safe to ignore. One that names what it must not do is describing a tool rather than selling a dream, and tools with known limits are the ones that get adopted. We made the same argument about the content side in AI for chiropractors: the technology works when it amplifies a real practitioner and fails the moment it substitutes for one. Day one in Orlando made the identical case for the operational side, which is telling.
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Most readers were not in that room. The transferable part fits in three steps, and none of them need a conference badge.
It is also, frankly, the honest version of what a chiropractic practice management improvement looks like. Not a transformation, not a new identity for the practice, just the removal of a category of work that was quietly eating the evenings.
Pick the one document that hurts most
Not five documents. One. For most practices it is the front-desk SOP, because that is where every absence, resignation and busy morning becomes chaos. Describe to a language model exactly how the desk runs now, morning open, intake, rebooking at checkout, phones, end of day, and ask for it as a structured procedure. Then correct what it got wrong, which is the step that makes the document yours.
Put a boundary in writing on the same day
Before the tools spread through the team, write the two-line policy: no patient names, no clinical details, nothing identifiable into general AI tools, ever. The session treated this as non-negotiable and so should any practice. A boundary adopted on day one costs nothing. The same boundary retrofitted after a mistake is a very different conversation.
Then judge it in a month. The test for whether any of this mattered is not enthusiasm this week. It is whether the SOP exists, is printed, and survived contact with a real Monday. Operational change in chiropractic practice management is only real when the practice runs differently with the owner out of the building, which is, not coincidentally, exactly what the CEO framing of the session was pointing at.
Days Two and Three
The event continues through Saturday. The expo hall runs 9:00 AM to 5:45 PM both days, Friday closes with the expo reception at 5:00 PM and the ChiroPAC Prohibition Party at 6:00 PM in the Orlando Ballroom, and Saturday winds down with the National University Reception at 5:30 PM. Our guide to getting real value from the remaining days, including how to work the floor and the follow-up that decides whether the week paid for itself, is here.
Worth watching in the remaining sessions: whether the other tracks pick up the same operational thread. If the documentation and compliance rooms start talking about AI-drafted procedures, and the practice management sessions treat the tooling as assumed rather than novel, that says more about where the profession is than any single course could.
If you are at the event
One of our team is in Orlando through Saturday. If you want to compare notes on any of this, AI in the office, video, or what you are seeing on the floor, reach out through the contact form on our website and we will find a time before the hall closes.
For what remains of the programme, the advice from our pre-event guide holds: the crowded rooms are not reliably the useful ones, the last afternoon on the floor is the most candid, and whatever conversations matter this week are worth writing up on the flight home, because the forty-eight hours after the hall closes are where the value of the week is either banked or quietly lost.
We will publish our notes from the final days once the event wraps. The sessions get quieter toward the end, the conversations get more honest, and the last afternoon is usually where the most useful material comes from. If day one is any guide, the story of this year's National is not any single tool. It is a profession quietly deciding that the office, not the adjustment, is where the next improvement comes from.
