On Tuesday, October 27, we hosted The Paubox Table in the Poolhouse at The Arthur J in Manhattan Beach, California.

The mood in the room: everyone is excited, and a little nervous. AI is saving people real time. It is also raising questions about PHI, staffing, and who should be building what.

It was a small table, which made for a candid conversation about AI in healthcare.

Evan Fitzgerald and Greg Hoffman hosted for Paubox.

See related: The Paubox Table: Dinner at Bern's Steakhouse in Tampa

Our takeaways

  • AI gets you 80% of the way there. Tools like Claude are now part of everyday work for writing, research, and getting a first draft on the page. The last 20% is where healthcare lives, and nobody at the table trusts AI to finish the job on its own.
  • Teams are doing more with fewer people. Several guests are seeing entry-level roles shrink as small, senior teams move faster with AI. The open question: if junior roles go away, how does the next generation of experts learn the ropes?
  • Vibe coding still needs a grown-up in the room. AI can spin up a working prototype in an afternoon. It can't tell you how your business runs. Without that context, you're building technical debt as fast as you're building features.
  • Building is starting to beat waiting. Large health systems move slowly on AI vendors for good reason, but the wait can stretch past a year. More teams are building targeted tools in-house instead.
  • Policies don't stop people. Policies don't prevent people from using AI on their own devices. Ban it, and it moves to personal phones and browser tabs, often with no business associate agreement (BAA) in sight.

Where we landed

Nobody thinks healthcare should slow down on AI. The consensus was that teams need safe, compliant rails to build on, so the tools people already want to use don't put patient data at risk.

That's part of why the Paubox MCP server drew a lot of interest at the table. It lets AI assistants like Claude send HIPAA compliant email, so teams can build their own workflows without giving up privacy.

See related: The Paubox Table: Dinner at Bern's Steakhouse in Tampa

Seven people in conversation around a long dinner table in the Poolhouse at The Arthur J in Manhattan Beach | The Paubox Table: October dinner in Manhattan Beach

Around the table in the Poolhouse.

A white dinner plate with The Arthur J script logo on a dark bar top | The Paubox Table: October dinner in Manhattan Beach

Even the plates are signed.