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“No amount of AI can make someone feel like they got a hug.”
— Rachel O’Brien
This episode is the after-show from our March 2026 Deeper Dive on changing your EHR — recorded immediately after, while we were still in that particular kind of mood that comes from an hour of collective charting platform grievances. Rachel stuck around, and we ended up somewhere we didn’t plan to go.
What we covered:
The conversation starts with chart reviews. Rachel walked through the process she used while developing Guiding Bottle Breakthroughs — exporting hundreds of bottle refusal charts and trying to pull patterns from the data. The problem: text fields. When you’re the one doing the charting, you write things slightly differently every time. The same bottle brand might appear four different ways across four hundred charts, and no amount of sorting will make that tidy. She tried throwing columns of text into an AI tool to collate it and got back numbers that were, as she put it, completely made up — confidently delivered and completely made up.
Annie’s workaround for this kind of analysis: export your chart data, strip out every field with protected health information so you’re working with de-identified data, and then bring it to an AI tool to help you organize and surface patterns — not to interpret your clinical findings, but to help you ask better questions about your own data. You still need enough knowledge to catch it when it’s wrong. (It will be wrong sometimes.)
From there the conversation moved to AI in practice more broadly — specifically the version of this problem that Rachel is seeing with clients: people who have already consulted a generative AI tool about bottle refusal before they arrive, and who come in with advice that contradicts what Rachel is about to tell them. She talked about her quality test for any source, human or AI: does it frame bottle refusal as the baby having a hard time, or as the baby being stubborn? That framing tells you everything about the approach that follows — and AI tends to flip back and forth on it without understanding why the distinction matters.
Leah and Annie added their own versions of this — clients arriving with AI-generated growth projections, feeding plans built on sources that don’t exist, contradictory advice from the overview that now appears at the top of search results. The consensus: AI isn’t going away, it’s not going to replace what we do, and the fact that clients are using it is actually making the case for trained human expertise stronger, not weaker. No AI has ever made someone walk out of a consult feeling genuinely better. That part is still ours.
The episode closes with an update on Guiding Bottle Breakthroughs — Rachel’s course on bottle feeding and bottle refusal is going evergreen. Once you’re enrolled, you’re in, with lifetime access to the course library and everything that gets added going forward.
Listen now to discover:
- How to use AI tools to analyze your own de-identified chart data
- Why AI keeps getting bottle refusal wrong — and Rachel’s framework for evaluating any source
- The case for human expertise in a world where clients are Googling before they call you
- Guiding Bottle Breakthroughs is going evergreen
“ Our gift to everybody is: don’t do all the things that we did.”
— Leah Jolly
Links and Resources
- Subscribe to Deeper Dive — $20/month, 50+ recordings going back to 2020
- Guiding Bottle Breakthroughs
- Choosing a charting platform: Annie’s updated comparison post
- Subscribe to the Deeper Dive Membership: https://learn.paperlesslactation.com/subscription/deeper-dive-membership
- Have an idea for a podcast episode or a Deeper Dive? Let us know! https://learn.paperlesslactation.com/form/collaborate
- Submit your listener questions here: https://forms.gle/NsmGysHMAULW9o1z5
Highlights:
0:59 – Charting struggles
1:33 – Data collection techniques
6:53 – Limitations of AI technology
8:52 – Perspectives on charting platforms
12:22 – AI and its impact on clients
16:29 – Why a human touch is still very important in private practice
About Us
Leah Jolly is a private practice IBCLC with Bay Area Breastfeeding in Houston, Texas. Annie Frisbie is a private practice IBCLC serving Queens and Brooklyn in New York City, and the creator of Paperless Lactation.
The Lactation Business Coaching podcast is produced by us and edited by Jillian Grover, who also writes our show notes. Our theme song is by Silas Wade.
