Robert Duhaney, MD, has spent the past several years watching two forces reshape primary care at the same time: a rapidly scaling corporate environment and a patient population that increasingly shows up to appointments having already consulted an AI chatbot.
Dr. Duhaney is office medical director at One Medical’s main clinic in downtown Austin, Texas, where he joined in April 2021. The San Francisco-based primary care company has been under new ownership since Amazon completed its $3.9 billion acquisition of the practice in 2023 and has over 220 clinics nationwide seeing patients of all ages.
“One Medical has traditionally operated with the energy of a primary care startup — approachable, modern and thoughtfully designed,” Dr. Duhaney said. “We’ve always placed a strong emphasis on running on time, creating beautiful and welcoming offices, and giving patients an intuitive app that connects them easily to our broader care platform. Just as importantly, we foster a collaborative environment where every member of the care team can contribute, communicate, and work together to deliver a better patient experience. When Amazon acquired One Medical, the goal was to provide the resources needed to scale this model and bring it to more people.”
One way Amazon is supporting that expansion is by investing in AI tools designed to assist clinicians with tasks such as visit documentation and interpreting laboratory results. Against this backdrop of rapid change, Dr. Duhaney has been paying close attention to how AI is becoming part of everyday medical practice — both behind the scenes in clinical operations and inside the exam room, where patients are increasingly arriving with their own AI-generated information about their own care.
One Medical’s patient population has traditionally skewed toward people who were already highly engaged in their health, even before AI became part of the conversation, Dr. Duhaney said.
“Because One Medical has historically been offered as a health benefit by many technology companies, our patients have tended to be very informed and proactive — even before AI,” he said. “Many are young professionals who follow popular health podcasts, track a wide range of metrics through wearables, and order detailed biomarker panels.”
“They’re uploading functional-medicine lab results into Claude or ChatGPT and generating a lot of information,” he added.
Dr. Duhaney sees his role as helping patients cut through that noise. He encourages them to step back from the often-overwhelming volume of sleep scores, wearable data, and biomarker panels and reconnect those measurements to the fundamentals of health: nutrition, exercise, sleep, mental health, and supportive relationships.
Rather than dismissing the wellness and biohacking culture patients bring into the exam room, Dr. Duhaney said he welcomes those conversations — and often learns from them. He appreciates patients who take an active interest in their health, while positioning himself between emerging wellness trends and traditional medicine. That sometimes means pushing back when a trend begins to displace essential, evidence-based care or when the claimed benefit is not well established.
“The ROI is much greater addressing alcohol overconsumption or vaping versus chasing an [heart rate variability] level for example,” Dr. Duhaney said. “I remind patients to focus on fundamental lifestyle changes first and build out from there.”
That same philosophy shapes how Dr. Duhaney thinks about the limits of AI in medicine. He pointed to recent public comments from a New York health system executive suggesting that radiologists could eventually be replaced by AI as an example of how the technology can be oversold.
“I don’t think that’s the answer,” he said. “AI can enhance a radiologist’s ability to interpret images, but clinical judgment still matters. A radiologist may look at a scan in the context of the patient’s history and think, ‘Something about this doesn’t fit.’ That instinct often reflects years of experience and pattern recognition.”
“AI can identify patterns,” he added, “but it doesn’t have intuition.”
Dr. Duhaney said One Medical is exploring ways AI can support more responsive, patient centered care. That includes tools that may help match appointment length more closely to the complexity of each patient’s needs. He described this as a promising example of how technology can improve the care experience when it is thoughtfully designed, carefully implemented, and used to support clinicians rather than replace them.
At the same time, he emphasized the importance of setting realistic expectations. AI’s greatest value, he said, lies not in substituting for clinical judgment or the human connection at the heart of medicine, but in strengthening both.
“AI should serve as a means to enhance the connection between clinicians and patients,” Dr. Duhaney said. “That’s where it can deliver the most meaningful benefit.”
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