AI And Digital Health Will Change Chiropractic Faster Than You Think

AI is rewriting healthcare while most clinics are still trying to survive the front desk rush, insurance friction, and an endless admin pile. We sit down with Dr. Jay Greenstein, a chiropractor, entrepreneur, and digital health builder, to talk about what it really takes to grow a modern chiropractic practice without losing your values or your sanity.

We start with Dr. Greenstein's guiding philosophy of kindness and his drive for justice, then get honest about leadership mistakes that nearly every clinic owner makes. Culture is not a poster on the wall. We explain how hiring for core values, building a repeatable recruiting and onboarding process, and putting the team first creates a better patient experience and a business that can actually scale. We also break down autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a practical framework for keeping purpose from getting crushed by daily chaos.

Then we zoom out to the biggest shift in chiropractic practice management right now: AI in healthcare and digital health. Dr. Greenstein shares why “learn, play, implement” beats fear and procrastination, plus concrete starting points with tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and more. We also talk patient engagement between visits, remote therapeutic monitoring, and why at-home care is becoming the expectation, especially for older adults focused on mobility and independence.

If you want clearer systems, better leadership, and a realistic path to adopting AI without the hype, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the one idea you are going to implement this week.

Transcript

Welcome And Big Picture Purpose

SPEAKER_01 0:06

I'm Dr. Merlin Four. I'm the Chairman and Founder of Activator Methods International. And uh I'm really pleased today to uh invite you to the Activate Your Practice podcast. By the way, we just got our 2025 uh statistics in, and we found out that it's not just chiropractors that are listening to this. We have other healthcare professionals listening to this and patients. And so today I'm really happy to have a doctor on board that's one of the far-out thinkers. I I like to think of that. And Dr. Greg Jay Greenstein has got a whole bunch of stuff he wants to talk about today. And I think you're gonna take your pencil and paper out because you want to listen carefully and write some things down. So, Jay, it's glad I'm glad to have you on.

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Thank you, Arlen. It's great to be here. It's an honor to be here, actually. So thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Well, you've got a lot of things that you have done, and I want to get them out there because people need to hear what's coming in the future.

Kindness And Justice As A Compass

SPEAKER_01 1:00

And what's your guiding philosophy and driving force?

SPEAKER_02 1:04

So I would say that my guiding philosophy is kindness. You know, every time I think about doing something nice for someone, I don't overthink it. I just try and do it. Um, I think kindness can really shape the world. Um, um, what really drives me and motivates me is justice. Um, I have seen way too much injustice in chiropractic. And, you know, everything from what happened with the AMA committee on quackery and how that's translated to chiropractors not having access or equity around payment or just other challenges that we face or have faced. Um, I I work really hard to try and um undo those injustices that I think a lot of chiropractors and therefore their patients have to deal with. So that is definitely a uh a motivating factor for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

What's a lesson you've learned about leadership that only came from getting it wrong first?

SPEAKER_02 1:53

How much time do we have? Yes, I can. Oh my God. Like I I have made so many mistakes over the years as an owner of multiple businesses. And I think probably the biggest mistake that I was making early on was not really understanding what it took to build a great culture. And it's, you know, came from Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, first who, then what? And it's really about getting the right people on the bus, doing the right work in the right way at the right time to ensure that you're really building a culture that drives a great business. And I didn't realize that. Took me years and years and years to realize how important people were to the organization. Um, and another kind of related topic is, you know, when I first started out in chiropractic, I was like, oh, the patient is the most important thing. Um, and that's only partially true because actually for me as a business owner and as a leader, my team is the most important thing. I'm there to serve my team. I'm there to make sure I'm creating the best possible experience for them so that they can in turn deliver the best possible experience for our patients. And it's funny, I know Gary V spoke today. And um, you know, he I've heard him say that, which is, you know, affirming that, hey, this is how we need to run our businesses.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

You know, my wife's the CEO of Activator. And when we got married, she I was the CEO and she told me, you're no more a CEO than a man in the moon. I said, Well, what am I? And she said, You're a CDO. And I said, What's that? She said, That's the chief delegating authority.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

And uh, she was right. Uh, I couldn't manage people. And uh she came in and she would do things and say things to people, and she'd get away with it. And I'd say, How do you do that? And she says, Because I'm fair. I love that. And her staff

Leadership Lessons From Culture Mistakes

SPEAKER_01 3:35

all knew it. So I asked her one day, well, how do you like the business? She said, I love the business, it's the people. That's where you have the problem.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

And she's exactly right.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

Yeah. People can be a challenge, but when you're when you have a recruiting philosophy and you've got a recruiting process, which we have in our businesses, like we have a very specific process that we follow. So that we are always aligned in bringing in the right person that aligns with our core values. So it's not about skills on a resume, it's about core values. Who is the person in front of me? What kind of a person are they? Do they align with the same kind of values that we align with? There's no good or bad. It's like, do you align or do you not? And do your behaviors reflect that? And so whether it's our recruiting process, our interview process, our onboarding process, that all follows a very specific um uh track in order to make sure that we got the right people on the bus.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Now you lead teams and clinics. How many clinics do you have?

SPEAKER_02 4:26

We have four clinics in the DC region.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Four clinics in the DC region. Yep. And how do you keep uh purpose from getting lost in the day?

SPEAKER_02 4:34

Um Yeah, like, you know, there's chaos um, you know, all the time, you know, there's patients coming in, patients come in late, patient, you know, doesn't understand their copay. Like there's always those things that happen. But again, when you bring in the right people and they've been trained really, really well, and they also have autonomy. We've built mastery with them because we've trained them really well. They have autonomy, they get to make decisions, they're empowered to make the right decisions, um, and they they know the purpose of the organization. This comes from Dan Pink's book, Drive, Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. That's what drives intrinsic motivation and um helps uh employees just be much more productive at work and have a better, a better experience. When those things happen, managing those day-to-day things don't feel so bad.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Do you manage day-to-day or do you have somebody that does it?

SPEAKER_02 5:18

Um, so I have a chief integration officer and she really handles all the operations. Um, my clinic directors are my direct reports. So they do report directly to me. Kat, who's our chief integration officer, is also involved in our weekly level 10 meetings. But um I do my best to support the clinic directors. Um, it's about leadership, not about management. We say this all the time: like leadership is about people, management is about process. So, my operations person, she's great. She's great with people and process. So that really helps because I'm the, you know, hey, butterfly, hey, unicorn. Like I'm the I'm the thinker, I'm the big thinker. I got the ideas, and she's the person who's like, okay, some of these are good ideas, not all of them. We're gonna, this is how we're gonna put these ideas into place.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Well, Bill Morgan said when I told her the story about Judy saying I was no more a CEO, you know, that I was uh this chief delegating officer. And she said, he said, come back and tell you you're the chief visionary officer. That's right. That's right. And she said, I don't know the word detail.

unknown 6:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

And when I found that out and let people that did do detail do the detail, it freed me to do what I did best.

SPEAKER_02 6:21

Absolutely. It's so interesting because in even in the business literature, they talk about, you know, what are the what are the key drivers of great leadership? And self-awareness always bubbles to the top. So if you're aware or I'm aware, or leaders are aware of what their strengths are and where they like need to, like, to your point, delegate

Autonomy Mastery And Purpose In Clinics

SPEAKER_02 6:35

and let those other people who have those strengths do that work, everybody's so much happier in the business, just you know, it scales so much faster.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Um what's the biggest shift in healthcare? And how do you think chiropractors are should think differently about engagement?

SPEAKER_02 6:48

Oh, again, how much time do we have? Listen, that's a big question. The biggest shift in healthcare is what's going on in the world today, and that's AI and digital health. You know, AI is changing the world that we live in for everybody, not just chiropractors and their patients. It's like changing the world exponentially fast. And chiropractors, um, you know, we've seen it this weekend and we've seen it in other events that we've done. Like they are just not engaging at a rate in which they need to in order to keep even attempt to keep up with the changes that are taking place. And and what I always say is the, you know, the people that learn, play, and implement AI win. And I just encourage all the kairos and all the people out there to just play, like try different tools. Nothing's gonna suck you into the interwebs. You're not gonna like all like spontaneously explode, but you need to start utilizing AI. And then when it comes to digital health, obviously this is my wheelhouse as well because I have a digital health company. And I would argue it's the first real digital health company in chiropractic providing remote therapeutic monitoring software for patients. Um, chiropractors need to understand digital health is a huge part of healthcare in general in this country and around the world. But chiropractors haven't really adopted it because we know that these things right here, our hands, do amazing work. Awesome. When patients come into the practice, we can use our hands, we can use our brains, we can use our hearts. When they're not in the clinic, how do we make sure they're getting a good outcome? They're doing their exercises, they haven't had any exacerbation after their last adjustment, that they're they don't need some other form of support to get them through their care journey. And digital health software tools allow us to do that. We can stay connected to our patients when they're not in the clinic in order to ensure a great outcome. And we were just talking about this before the podcast, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Like, you know, I can actually say the J that uh this doctor gets on, you know, television and says, you buy my little kit for 265 bucks and you just read what's wrong with you and then use the prescription that you've got there. You don't have to go to the urgent care and things like that. Right. And that is, I think that's where people they're they're looking at and say, I don't have to go down to ask some medical doctor uh to give me uh uh something that can help my uh UTI or something that's simple, they have it. They probably had it 10 times in a row.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

And so they can do that. But then you said something about telehealth and how the patient can call, you know, somebody at the doctor's office instead of driving in to see what he tells you in five minutes.

SPEAKER_02 9:03

Yeah. I mean, we talked about this at the summit meeting. I shared the statistic. Um, you know, Best Buy actually now instead of just having Geek Squad, they've got a whole division around installing Bluetooth enabled devices in patients or in people's homes so that doctors can use these Bluetooth enabled devices to monitor things like, you know, heart uh issues, blood pressure issues, uh glucose, blood glucose issues. You know, patients, 32% of patients want their health care to be delivered at home. And usually it's the elder population because they don't want to get in their car and drive and sit somewhere where other people are sick in a reception area in a PCP's office. So chiropractors have to embrace digital health.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Yes, I I'm in totally agreeing with you because just uh, you know, because I am one, I I'm into the, you know, the older folks, because what makes them, you know, be able to live alone or live, you know, free and independent. And uh it's all

AI And Digital Health Shift

SPEAKER_01 9:55

about mobility. Absolutely. And so if you don't have mobility, and uh we're looking at other things that we can do to help that age group in mobility because they quit doing things.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

And that's when they end up with, you know, problems.

SPEAKER_02 10:09

All kinds of issues, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Uh what advice would you give a chiropractor who feels stuck between wanting to help more patients and then feeling burnt out?

SPEAKER_02 10:17

Hmm. Uh it's a tough one. Um, I think you really have to dig deep and figure out what is the problem holding you back. You know, is are they people issues, are they process issues, or is it a knowledge issue? You know, early on in my career, Arlen, um, we almost went bankrupt. We were growing our practices, you know, we had multiple practices, we had acquired a practice and we were seeing lots of patients, but we weren't bringing in revenue because we didn't know how to bill properly. And so we were, you know, lots of expenses out, not enough money coming in. That's how people go bankrupt. And so what I realized is that I needed to just change the way that I was thinking and leading. And so I went outside of chiropractic. I went to University of Pennsylvania, um, Wharton School of Business. They had a small business development center, and I learned like how to run a business. And I would listen to business books, you know, driving back and forth. Now there's all kinds of resources available, like podcasts that people can listen to just to learn more. But I think you have to ask yourself the question like, why am I burned out? You know, where's my purpose? How do I serve my purpose best?

SPEAKER_01 11:16

But but I find something in the younger people today. I mean, uh, when I was a young practitioner, we started at nine o'clock in the morning because I wasn't a morning person. But we went to 10 o'clock at night. And we did that two, two full days a week, and then plus our regular uh office hours. And we never felt burnt out. As a matter of fact, when we walked out of a day when we saw 100 people, we were elated. Sure. And so I'm wondering why are the people being burnt out? I think it's because they're not doing anything.

SPEAKER_02 11:46

You know, it's hard to say. I think everybody has a different reason for burnout. Sometimes maybe people have selected the wrong profession. Like they maybe they selected, you know, chiropractic and they shouldn't have. Um, but I will say this I think in the 32 years that I've been practicing, the administrative and regulatory burdens in running a practice have been substantially greater. And so I think there's a lot of extra stuff, a lot of extra noise that kind of gets in the way of us being able to serve our patients, which can cause some of these issues like burnout. But this is where tools like AI and digital health can actually help alleviate some of those things and make your practice more efficient so you can focus on doing the things that you love, which is taking care of patients.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

My wife's on a hospital board. And uh she would totally agree with you because what happens is when a young medical doctor graduates from, you know, medical school, they go into a hospital setting. All of the quote unquote business things are done by the business section. They do nothing but their medical training.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

And I think that's where chiropractic uh kids get confused because they come out and all of a sudden they're, you know, they're faced with all of these other things, and that burns them out, not taking care of people. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

I agree.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Am I correct?

SPEAKER_02 12:55

Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

Um a lot of practitioners are skeptical of AI. What do you say to them and where's the real opportunity they're missing?

SPEAKER_02 13:02

I mean, AI is here to stay. I mean, and it's and again, it's growing exponentially fast. There are new tools and new use cases coming out every single day, and the technology is evolving really, really quickly. If you want to improve efficiency in your practice, if you want to do a better job leading your team, if you want to make sure that you're um taking better care of your patients clinically, AI, there are so many AI tools that can help you do that. Um, we were having a, I belong to an entrepreneurial group in DC. It's a group called Cadre. I'm one of the founding members, and we've got just some leading experts in the AI world that are part of this group. And, you know, listening to my friend Jerry Simpson talking about just some of the new technology that's out there related to AI, OpenClaw being one of them, where literally you set up a computer, you install an agent, and it can do anything that another human could do and do it exponentially faster. And also connecting kind of different areas of your business together. So whether it's I need to book a flight to go to Parker, or I

Burnout Business Skills And Regulation

SPEAKER_02 13:55

need to set up a meeting with Arlen to do his podcast, or I need to order lunch for my team because they hit a goal, it can do all those things. And so this is where AI is going and it's happening really fast, but you don't have to start there, right? You don't have to start with OpenClaw. What I would suggest is there's great tools that are out there. A lot of people have at least tried Chat GPT. There's Gemini with Google, there's Claude Perplexity, Gamma if you want to build presentations. There's lots of different tools that are out there. Just try them.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

One of my older friends got into Chat GPT. Now he doesn't go to the bathroom without checking the chat BT GPT. So funny. It's part of his life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

It's uh it's super interesting, right? There's there are lots of different elements around these LLMs, these large language models. I have a friend of mine who I have two friends, actually different friends. Uh Brad Cost, who's the CEO of Infinity, who who you know, big chiropractic advocate. Um, you know, he's built his own agent and he'll have conversations with this agent. His agent's name is Sage, and he'll have the conversation every morning with his coffee, right? Uh, my other friend has an my friend Larry from college, you know, he has conversations with his AI all the time. And what's really interesting is that as you use these models, they actually learn about you. Sure. So, in the spirit of self-awareness and learning about ourselves, it actually can be quite beneficial because it can shine a mirror in our faces and tell us where we can actually be better professionals, be better doctors, be better humans.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Well, this particular person I'm talking about didn't believe in blood work. Can you believe this? And my wife again went to this board meeting and they had a young lady there that did, she's the head of the stroke division of this whole uh dignity healthcare. And she gave them signs and symptoms and so forth. And my wife gets home from that meeting, said, Arlen, you should have been at that meeting because you would have just loved it. I said, Why don't we put her on the podcast? And they said, Well, you know, to go through this and that and everything. And I said, Wait a minute. Didn't you buy the emergency room at uh Chandler Regional Gurney's last year because there weren't enough? And didn't you buy a refrigerator for them? I said, talk to your people. And so here's what they said. Well, no, we normally don't do that, but for Arlene we will.

SPEAKER_02 16:05

I love it.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

And so we this is a podcast you we'll be coming out next week with, where she talks about the things you should look for before you, you know, get, you know, in a position that can cause you to you know have a stroke and not have the right things to take care of it. And she just laid out a whole thing and she was fabulous doing this because that's what she does. And uh at the end, my wife said, we have to give her something, you know. And so she has a camp for stroke people in Prescott, Arizona in the summer where they take them up for a week and they can l go with other people that have had damage done and they can learn how to live with it. And so we contributed to her camp now. And she's just thrilled to death about her camp up there. Love it. But I think you're onto this whole thing, and I think, you know, I had a vision one time of, you know, you get off an airplane and you're tight and you need to be adjusted and so forth, and you walk over to this, looks like a telephone booth, you back in, these rods go down your spine, and they say, well, here's where the problem is. Out comes an instrument, and boom, it does, and then it says, put your credit

The Real Opportunity With AI Tools

SPEAKER_01 17:15

card in here to get out of the booth. Brilliant model. I love that model. I was that was years ago, and I'll I'm I'm thinking now, you know, this is possible.

SPEAKER_02 17:25

Absolutely. It's very possible. Absolutely possible.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

It's very possible. Yes. And uh as a matter of fact, I knew a couple of researchers that had done some things with equipment, but they didn't carry it far enough. They were doing academic, they weren't thinking clinically.

SPEAKER_02 17:38

Right. Or or even commercially. Right. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

No, they they didn't have a clue. Yeah. But uh so I'm gonna investigate that. I love it. But um uh you balanced being a clinician and an entrepreneur, advocate, family man. What's something you that you got wrong about the balance that others should hear?

SPEAKER_02 17:56

Um, I I'm pretty much a workaholic. I work a lot. Um, I love what I do. I love, love, love chiropractic. Um, but I I do probably work too much. I probably need to find a bit more time to just find like joy in other things. So I am going skiing after this event this week, so I'm happy about that. With your kids. Uh I don't have kids. Oh, you don't have to kill you. I don't have kids, no. I don't have kids. Uh just a dog. Okay. But um, my dog doesn't ski. So it's just gonna be me. Okay. But um, but yeah, like just finding a bit more uh non-work time is probably something that I would I would recommend for anybody else who's out there feeling the same way that I feel. And I don't feel like I'm burned out. Um, I love what I do, but I still feel like I need a bit more non-work time. Just balance. Balance, right? Yeah, balance, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of advice about building something meaningful in this profession, what would it be?

SPEAKER_02 18:52

Keep going. Just keep going.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

It's a funny thing you say that. My youngest brother is an inventor, kind of like except he's in the uh airplane world. And uh I've seen him up, down, and around through different entrepreneurial things because he developed things where, oh, for example, when they had the big oil spill in Texas, remember that? And then you had uh they paid him 1.3 million to go down and just see how the oil flow was because he knew how to set up cameras. Wow. That's the kind of thing. And then he would go off on another tangent, and uh I said to him the other day, because he stopped to visit, and I said, uh David, one thing that I have admired in you, and he thought uh you admired something in me. I'm his older brother. I said, Yeah. He said, What is it? I said, You never quit. You never quit. And I think that's what you're saying.

SPEAKER_02 19:44

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

Uh what's something you believe strongly about the future of chiropractic that isn't talked about enough?

SPEAKER_02 19:53

Uh a few things. One, I think we're a lot more connected and together than we've ever been. I know there's a lot of kind of silent minority noise out there, but I think it's noise. I think we are more connected than we've ever been. I also feel like the general public um is way more accepting of chiropractic than it has ever been before. And I think we're close to that tipping point where because I think I think since COVID, the public has been fed up with just the standard medical healthcare delivery system. And I think people are starting to realize like that's not the answer. And that chiropractic is a big part of the answer of keeping people healthy and and well. And mobile. And mobile, right. That's a huge part of it.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

And the geriatric population is huge. I mean, you know, we don't quite realize it because

Chiropractic Growth And Geriatric Mobility

SPEAKER_01 20:35

we're well, I am, but uh, you know, somebody said, How do you keep mobile? And everything I said, I've got two schnauzers, you know, they need to be walked every day.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

And just that kind of exercise keeps people going. Yep. And I think as practitioners, we need to stress that. And uh we we found a piece of equipment here the other day that was used in another country. They've been doing uh geriatrics wrong, they've been doing the rehab wrong. And they figure out how to do it. Very cool. And so uh we're gonna we'll introduce that here shortly, but it will be something that it takes five minutes a week to reintroduce the geriatrics to their muscle tone.

SPEAKER_02 21:17

I love that. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

And that's the kind of thing if we can keep them out of rest homes, nursing homes, and assisted care, what would be better?

SPEAKER_02 21:24

Amazing. I mean, that would be amazing. And I listen, my mom is in memory care right now, and she she didn't really do what she needed to do to take care of herself as she was getting older. And this is the result, right? So we give people the tools, we set up the environment, we help them build healthy habits, it changes the world.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

And I think you alluded to it before, like you take your uh watch that you're, you know, you're wearing your Apple watch, and it can do everything from blood pressure to blood sugar. Sure. And when people see that, then they're careful. Yep. And I think that's the one way I I put a patch on one time just to see where I was. And because I eat out all the time, I found out that it was the salads that were causing trouble. I went to vinegar and oil with the salads, solved the problem.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

So I hear what you're saying,

Embody Health And Closing Sponsor

SPEAKER_01 22:10

and I think you're on the right track. And so I'm really I'm glad you came in to share this with everybody.

SPEAKER_02 22:15

Thank you, Arlen.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

And by the way, what's the name of your company in case anybody wants to learn about this?

SPEAKER_02 22:19

Sure, it's embody e-m-b-o-di, embody, embody health. So it's embody health.com. Embod embody. Like we are embodying health, yes, embody with an eye.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

Yeah, embodyhealth.com. Yep. Okay. Well, all of you listening out there, uh, now you know where you can go to find out how to do things with AI. Uh Jay, thank you. Dr. Green C thank you for coming. We really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_02 22:42

My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, buddy.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Thanks for listening to Activate Your Practice Podcast. Remember, this is brought to you by Soft Tech Table Company. You can find more information on this table at softtechtables.com.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

Softtech manufactures specialized treatment tables designed to help chiropractors who utilize the activator method, maximize their time, and the success of their procedures. Upgrade to the only adjusting tables endorsed by Activator Methods at Softech Tables.com.