How to Build an Innovative Peds Practice: Highlights from Dr. Hobbs

What happens when a pediatrician who lives and breathes technology helps design the tools they use every day? That was the question behind Elation Health’s recent webinar, “How to Build an Innovative Peds Practice,” featuring Minneapolis pediatrician and Elation clinical co-designer Dr. Michael Hobbs, in conversation with Dr. Sarah Pastoor.

Rather than a slide-heavy product tour, the session was a practical, story-driven look at how a lean, AI-powered pediatric practice can deliver safer medicine, better family experiences, and a more sustainable business model—when the EHR is actually built around pediatrics from the start.

From fee-for-service to a lean, tech-forward pediatric practice

Dr. Hobbs has practiced pediatrics across nearly every documentation era—paper charts, dictation, template-heavy EHRs, and large enterprise systems like Epic—before opening his own direct primary care (DPC) practice three years ago. He made that move to focus more time on high-quality care and to carve out capacity to work directly with technology companies on better clinical tools.

Today, his “team” is intentionally lightweight: largely just him, a virtual assistant, and a suite of AI tools—including a custom-built AI triage assistant—that keep his operations lean without compromising access or safety for families. That real-world perspective now shapes his part-time role at Elation as a clinical co-designer, where he collaborates with product and design teams to bring frontline pediatric workflows, edge cases, and clinical judgment directly into how features are built and refined.

Designing an EHR that actually understands pediatrics

A recurring theme in the conversation: most EHRs have not met expectations for pediatrics—and Dr. Hobbs is blunt about how hard it’s been historically to find systems that truly support pediatric workflows. He chose Elation because of both the clinical-first core and the way it integrates with the broader pediatric tech ecosystem.

A few of the pediatric workflows he showcased live:

• How immunizations, growth charts, and weight-based dosing are handled when the EHR is actually built for kids.

• How digital screeners, school forms, and referrals flow straight into the chart instead of living in separate systems.

In the webinar, you can see how all of this sits on top of a tech-forward infrastructure—from Developer Access APIs that let advanced users like Dr. Hobbs build practice-specific tools on top of Elation to an explicit shift toward an AI-first platform for pediatrics and primary care.

AI as a “battle buddy,” not a black box

When asked what he’d give every pediatrician in America, Dr. Hobbs didn’t name a single app—he described a trusted AI assistant that lives inside the EHR: a “battle buddy” that understands your patients, your style, and your workflows, and quietly orchestrates your day by surfacing what matters and deflecting noise.

Elation’s current AI capabilities are early steps toward that vision:

• Clinical Insights uses AI to reason over the chart—summarizing problems, medications, and growth and development, or extracting targeted views like “list all antibiotics this patient has received”—to get clinicians up to speed quickly before a visit.

• AI-powered documentation tools like Wordsmith and AI Scribe help draft referral letters, visit summaries, and other clinical narratives based on real chart data and reusable templates, while still keeping the clinician firmly in control.

Crucially, Dr. Hobbs emphasizes that AI is never a “set and forget”: accuracy depends on good prompting, clean underlying data, and strong guardrails, and every AI-generated output still requires a human in the loop to review and correct before it becomes part of the record or goes out to another clinician or family.

Building an innovative peds practice that’s financially sustainable

Innovation for Dr. Hobbs isn’t just about clever features; it’s about supporting real business models—from fee-for-service to DPC to hybrid practices—without burying practices in extra systems and fees.

Elation’s built-in membership management and payments allow DPC pediatricians to manage recurring membership billing directly in the EHR, including self-enrollment links and multiple cards on file, without a separate platform fee—just payment processing costs. For busy peds teams, that’s one less integration to chase and one more piece of the practice wrapped into a clinical-first workflow.

If this sparks questions about your own pediatric workflows, documentation burden, or tech stack, the best next step is to see the full conversation.

Watch the on-demand webinar with Dr. Hobbs and Dr. Pastoor: Hear from Dr. Hobbs – How technology co-designed by pediatricians can put kids and clinicians first

If you’d like to go deeper after watching, you can always request a tailored pediatric demo from Elation to walk through your current setup and explore how a clinical-first, AI-powered EHR shaped with pediatric input might fit your model—whether fee-for-service, membership-based, or hybrid.