How to Create a Custom AI Agent for Your Practice
For Calgary-based occupational therapist, educator, and mentor Carlyn Neek, working with AI can be summarized in two words, all caps: “MIND BLOWING!”. With the growing popularity of the technology, Carlyn, like many other practitioners, became curious about how it could help her in her practice. One of her first experiments was marketing.
Carlyn struggled to describe her strengths as a practitioner in her marketing materials. "Because I'm so intimately involved, I can't always articulate what's special about this community of therapists or what makes what I do unique,” she explains.
She asked AI to summarize what makes her business and community special and the result was unexpectedly accurate. AI reflected her mission back to her with a clarity she hadn’t been able to find herself. “AI really did a beautiful job, and I feel more confident about my marketing messaging and program development as a result,” she says.
Health and wellness business owners and admin staff face to-do lists that seem to grow faster than they can cross things off. There’s always another form to fill, another question to answer, another process that lives only in their head.
But Carlyn’s experience points to a reconsidered way of doing things, one where AI can come in and help, taking the often invisible work of practitioners and admin staff, and turning it into something that can be catalogued, shared, and replicated across a team.
What is a custom AI agent and how can it help your clinic?
A custom AI agent (sometimes called a custom GPT, co-pilot, or AI assistant depending on the platform you use) is your own personalized version of an AI tool, designed to help you with a specific task or output. Different companies call their agents by various names, but custom agents generally come with the paid version of an AI platform such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. They’re trained by you, to respond much like you would, using the knowledge you provide. Think of it as a digital teammate, who’s well-versed in your team’s playbook.
Let’s say your clinic has a ChatGPT account. You could create a tone GPT, which helps produce emails that sound like you, or an admin policy GPT, which could help train new staff, or maybe even an gatherings GPT for planning community events.
The best custom AI agents are created by people who deeply understand their role and what they’re looking to get out of it. Armed with human knowledge, resources, and the power of AI, a custom agent can serve as a trusted assistant, and help health and wellness admins and business owners take a few tasks off their to-do lists.
🤔 Where is AI most helpful?
💡AI is a tool, but it’s also fallible. Any AI-generated content or research should always get a human edit or fact check. And if you’re ever uncertain of an output, it’s best to double-check with a person. AI gets you part of the way there, but it can rarely do an entire job.
Real-life use cases: how AI can help make data-informed decisions
After seeing what AI could do with words, Carlyn decided to test its power with data. As a podcast creator and host, she built an AI agent to help her spot patterns and improve her process.
Carlyn first asked the AI to create an SEO plan, which helped her refine her podcast’s title and description. She then shared data from previous episodes, including titles, descriptions, transcripts, and performance stats, and asked the AI to analyze trends. Using those insights, she made sure her content aligned with her audience’s interests. She also created clear instructions for future tasks like writing titles, show notes, and YouTube descriptions, all of which help make her podcast easier for people to find.
What AI is good at: data synthesis and pattern recognition is a real strength of AI. It’s a great tool to help you spot trends in your business data so you can make informed decisions.
Try it yourself: create a custom agent to help you pull a monthly metrics report and assess whether you’re meeting (or falling short of) your business goals.
💡If this article has sparked your interest in how AI can be used beyond admin and business tasks, AI Scribe for Health Practitioners: a Guide to Getting Started is a great next read. It covers how AI Scribes can be used to help with note-taking in a clinical setting.
How to create your own custom AI agent
When you sit down to create an agent, the first step is to think of your instructions as though you were writing a job description. It’s a bit of a structured brain dump of the context you have, the steps you take, and the end result you’re looking for. The more specific you can be, the better.
1️⃣ What problem is your agent solving for you?
Define your agent’s role. For the sake of this example, let’s say you’d like it to act as a clinic trainer and digital office assistant for a physical therapy practice. Its job is to help new admin staff learn clinic procedures, communication best practices, and support in answering any frequently asked questions.
2️⃣ Provide clear instructions
Name the result you’re looking for. In this case, it’s an onboarding support tool, designed to teach and guide admin staff on how to handle everyday tasks like booking appointments, greeting patients, and managing cancellations, while providing helpful answers to questions as they learn.
Set the tone. Ask yourself what great onboarding should look and feel like. In this example, we’d like the tone to be warm, clear, and encouraging, like a helpful mentor. We’d like it to always explain the importance of a rule or critical step. We believe it’s important for our staff to understand a process, but also why it matters.
Outline core functions. I’d like my admin trainer to:
- Explain clinic procedures.
- Give examples of how we speak to patients, and ways we don’t.
- Reference uploaded training manuals, policies, or documents as the source of truth when asked questions.
- If unsure, say so and suggest that the staff member check with someone else on the team.
💡This is also a great time to set some boundaries, or what you’d like your agent not to cover. For example, you could request your agent only provide guidance on administrative topics and avoid any clinical guidance or questions related to personal matters.
3️⃣ Add context and data
Upload the building blocks of your clinic. If we were setting this up in a clinic, now would be the perfect time to upload key information to the agent. This could include resources or existing documents that outline your core systems and processes. Things like front desk policies, examples of great communication, supplier lists, and recommended workflows for using your software are especially helpful.
Think of it as creating a digital handbook of everything someone would need to know to do their job well.
4️⃣ Refine, refine, refine
Test your agent. Your first version might get a few things wrong, and that’s okay. Test it by asking questions to see what answers it produces, then tweak your instructions until it sounds right. Once you’re happy with its output, it’s time to share with your team.
💡Each AI platform will have its own algorithm, which will make its output a little different (even if your input is the same). Consider trying and testing a few platforms to be sure you’re selecting the agent that makes sense for your projects or tasks. And once you’ve got an agent you're happy with, don’t forget to check in frequently, as even agents will require maintenance and upkeep as any best practices or procedures change in your clinic.
Train your team. The final (but crucial) step is to share your AI agent with your team and show them how you’d like it to be used. This is also a great time to set a few boundaries with your staff. When it comes to health and wellness, a few common no-gos are:
- Do not input any patient data or information.
- When in doubt, always check with a human team member.
- Please review and edit all communications before sharing, since AI does make mistakes.
- Alert the person who created the custom agent to answers that feel incorrect or off.
💡Even if you don’t end up building a custom GPT or AI agent, considering how you’d like to approach onboarding is a great thought exercise. The questions above can help you think about ways you’d like your onboarding to feel and helpful resources you could create. For another perspective on onboarding, Why Onboarding is Key to Building Your Health and Wellness Practice is a great read.
The role of AI in your practice
AI is new, quickly evolving, and it’s totally natural (even prudent) to feel a mix of curiosity and uncertainty about it. But the truth is, AI is only as good as the person using it, and no tool can replace your empathy, intuition, or experience.
If you're up for it, it’s a tool worth considering and exploring, and when used thoughtfully, AI can take care of the repetitive work so you have more time for your clients, your team, or even just a bit of breathing room.
Want to dive a little deeper on AI? Check out some of the resources below:
- Carlyn’s blog post about using AI to improve her charting and documentation workflow
