A solo physician started with a folder of half-finished patient handouts. Two weeks later, her practice had a complete library, four interactive tools, and a way to make every future addition take five minutes instead of an afternoon. This is what AI looks like when you point it at a real, mid-sized problem instead of a buzzword.
The setupWhy a solo practice is a fair test for AI.
Most stories about AI in healthcare are hospital-scale stories — RFPs, change-management programs, six-figure pilots. None of which are useful if you are one doctor, one office, and a handful of staff.
The real opportunity for AI inside a small business isn't the moonshot. It's the mile-deep backlog of things you'd already do if you had the time. For Dr. Carrie Leff, DO — a board-certified internist and certified menopause provider running her own primary-care practice for women in midlife — that backlog included:
- Patient handouts she'd written notes for in the margins of charts but never finished.
- Calculators she'd been recreating from a paper risk chart printed in 1989.
- A menopause intake she walked through verbally, in pieces, on every fourth visit.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is the work.
The libraryForty-four branded patient handouts.
The first deliverable was a complete library — every handout self-contained, mobile-friendly, printable to letter-size, and matched to her existing brand (burgundy and rose, custom typography, embedded fonts so it works offline). Topics span the full surface area of an internal medicine practice focused on women's midlife health:
Patch, cream, and oral protocols — application, schedules, overlap, and context.
Bone density, calcium, contraception, and menstrual care across age groups.
Breast health, vulvar care, pelvic conditions, and curated specialist resources.
Digestive issues, food guidance, GLP-1 protocols, and kidney-stone prevention.
Sleep, light therapy, migraine care, and mental-health referral resources.
Skin protocols, vertigo, leg cramps, thyroid, and at-home device guidance.
The toolsFour interactive utilities, each replacing a manual workflow.
Beyond the library, four web utilities — each one collapsing something she had been stitching together with paper, memory, or a third-party site:
Breast Cancer Risk Calculator
A guided, multi-step intake that produces a risk read patients can take home — and that gives her something concrete to talk through in the room. Built to her brand, no third-party login, runs entirely in the browser.
Menopause Symptom Checklist
A structured intake patients fill out before the visit. The conversation now starts at the second question, not the first — the symptom map is already in front of her when the patient sits down.
Oral Contraceptive Quick Reference
A fast-lookup sheet for in-room decision-making. Replaces a pile of pharmacology notes she'd been carrying around in her head for a decade.
In-Room Order Builder
A live, searchable catalog of supplements, medications, labs, and procedures — with codes and pricing — that builds a running patient order in real time. Category filters, a fee section, and a clean total panel the patient can see her work on. Replaces a paper charge sheet and a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
The compoundingThe part that keeps paying back after week one.
The library and the tools matter. The thing that keeps mattering is what got built underneath them — two reusable automations the practice can call by name from now on:
The first time a tool runs, it saves an afternoon. The fifteenth time, it saves a season. The forty-fifth time, you stop thinking of it as a tool — it's just how new handouts get made.
In her wordsWhat it looks like from the doctor's side.
"I had a folder of half-finished patient handouts I'd been meaning to clean up for years. Jacob turned that folder into a full library — branded, printable, and built to keep growing — in a few weeks. He also built me tools I'd assumed were out of reach for a solo practice: a risk calculator, a menopause intake, a quick-reference for oral contraceptives, and an in-room order builder I now use on every visit. The patient experience is better. My time on every visit is better. And every new handout I make from here on takes minutes."
Dr. Carrie Leff, DO Internist · Certified menopause provider · drcarrieleff.comThe takeawayWhat this means if you run something small.
This is what AI advisory work looks like when it's done well — not a deck, not a chatbot, not a vague "transformation." A specific list of things the business already needed, built once, branded once, and made cheap to repeat.
Every small business has a version of this list. Half-written documents. A calculator a competitor charges for. A workflow that lives in one person's head. A backlog of the things you'd do if a Tuesday afternoon ever opened up.
The companies that win the next decade won't be the ones who experimented the most with AI. They'll be the ones who pointed it, calmly, at the work they were already trying to do.
Published with the permission of Dr. Carrie Leff. Specific handout content, patient interactions, and clinical details are not represented here — this case study is about the build itself, not the medicine.