Karan Kanwar is the CEO of Central AI and Wing Assistant. Central AI provides an AI operating system for appointment-driven medical practices, handling calls, texts, web chat, and messages around the clock, qualifying patients and booking appointments directly into a practice's existing systems. It is HIPAA compliant and designed to complement the tools practices already use.
Wing Assistant pairs that technology with skilled virtual assistants who take on the administrative work that pulls teams away from patient care. Kanwar writes on where automation and human support meet in health care operations, and how practice leaders can adopt both effectively. He shares updates on LinkedIn.
A physician finishes today’s note noticeably faster than they used to. The AI scribe listened, drafted, and closed most of the gap between seeing the patient and finishing the paperwork. At the end of the day? That’s less time hunched over a keyboard once the last patient leaves.
But ask, three months in, whether the practice is seeing more patients or capturing more revenue because of it. What comes back is …
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Why haven’t ambient AI scribes boosted productivity?
A patient is checking out after a routine visit, and the front desk has to say the number out loud: 400 dollars, today, under the deductible. The patient’s face changes. The staffer wasn’t hired for this conversation and doesn’t have much beyond “that’s what the system says you owe.”
This exact scene runs in practices everywhere, multiple times a day, and almost nobody standing at that desk was ever specifically trained …
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Patient balance collection is nobody’s actual job
The letter says denied. It’s not the first one this month, and the physician already knows how this goes: Read it, feel briefly annoyed, and move on to the next patient, because the last three appeals went nowhere and there’s no real reason to think this one would be different.
Nothing about that moment is really a decision anymore. It stopped being one a while back, and nobody noticed exactly when.
The …
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Prior authorization appeals stopped being a decision
A radiologist flags something on a scan that shouldn’t be there. The physician sends a referral to oncology that same day, the kind where a few weeks genuinely matter, not the kind you let sit in a queue. The system logs it, and the chart shows it as clean and complete: sent.
Four months later, at a visit for something unrelated (a sore shoulder, nothing serious), the physician asks how the …
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Closed-loop referral management needs a defined owner
Patients now have a way to reach a physician that no phone call ever offered: directly, in writing, at any hour, with no one screening it first. That was the entire point. It was also, it turns out, the entire problem.
A patient types “not feeling great today” into the portal. It could mean a cold. It could mean chest tightness they’re downplaying. The message looks the same either way, sitting …
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Triaging patient portal messages is a staffing problem
Physicians are precise about the value of their time in exactly one context: when someone else is paying for it. In a contract negotiation that precision is real, the figure gets built from actual numbers, and nobody signs something that prices an hour below what it’s worth.
Then the negotiation ends. The same physician spends Tuesday evening at the kitchen table verifying insurance eligibility for the next morning’s schedule, and the …
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The physician opportunity cost nobody puts on a bill
The best person at your front desk gives two weeks’ notice on a Tuesday. It’s nothing dramatic, just a better commute and a job that pays a little more. Everyone wishes her well, and the seat gets filled inside a month.
What doesn’t get filled shows up in pieces over the following weeks. A patient lands in a slot that’s been blocked off for a year, because he gets anxious and …
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Is institutional knowledge loss your staffing problem?
Ask a physician what the biggest business risk to their practice is, and most will land somewhere familiar. A lawsuit. A bad payer contract. A denial spike that guts a quarter’s revenue.
It is none of those. For a solo or independent physician, the single biggest risk to the practice is the physician’s own unavailability. Not the clinical kind anyone insures against. The plain fact of not being there to run …
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The biggest risk to your practice is you
Ask physicians why they don’t hand off more of the paperwork burying their day, and the answer comes fast. No time to train anyone. Not enough staff. The EHR fights it. All fair. Those are the reasons that surface when a practice sits down and asks why everyone’s stretched so thin.
There’s another reason on that list, though. Lower down. The one nobody says with the door open.
When the AMA Read more…
The real reason physicians won’t delegate paperwork
