Built by a clinician, for clinicians.

We have all been the patient, or sat beside one. On the gurney, three consulting teams have not agreed where you will be admitted, and you are still waiting. At the workstation, I have twelve other patients, and I am working out at 3 a.m. a decision my department could have made once, together, before either of us arrived.

I am an emergency physician and a clinical informaticist. Emergency medicine is where I started and where the first pathways were built, but the problem I kept meeting belongs to every department. I have spent years inside the usual way a care pathway gets made: a committee, months of meetings, a document on a shared drive, an email asking everyone to follow it, and no record of who agreed to what. The decision gets made again at every bedside anyway.

That is what burnout looks like up close. The National Academy of Medicine traces it to how the work is designed, not to the people doing it, so the fix has to be a system fix, not more individual sacrifice. A care pathway is a system fix any clinician can build. Decide it once, together, and the attention at the bedside goes back to the patient in front of you. That is what bringing back joy in healthcare means to me.

At the same time, clinical AI arrived the other way around: pre-built, priced for health systems, and shaped without the clinicians who would use it. Clinicians now ask AI tools clinical questions with no way to tell whether the answer follows their own hospital's protocols. The people who know the workflow are consulted at implementation, if at all.

So in 2023 I started building, on my own laptop, on days off and after hours. It began as a course on care pathway fundamentals and became the AI Studio: AI searches and grades the evidence and drafts the decision tree with the hospital's own cutoffs and resources, and the department's clinicians vote on every step, test it, and sign it. Every pathway comes out as an interactive page, with the record of who decided what.

I built it with the same AI it now puts in other clinicians' hands, and I am proud to share it with everyone: medical and quality directors with no coding experience, residents, nurses, pharmacists, small clinical groups and community departments as much as large academic centers. It is free, so that the clinicians who will live with the result are the ones who build it, now, before anyone else's AI arrives to run it.

The same decision gets remade at every bedside in hospital medicine, pediatrics, primary care, surgery and perioperative care, obstetrics, oncology, behavioral health and post-acute care, and the committee that is supposed to settle it looks the same in each. CarePathIQ is for every physician and for every clinician on the team: nurses, advanced practice providers (APPs), pharmacists, social workers, case managers and residents. It fits the ambulatory clinic that wants to manage more without a referral, the inpatient service that wants to discharge sooner with fewer tests, the community hospital and the physician group as much as the academic center.