Academic medicine has long prized the physician scientist — the clinician who moves fluidly between patient care and research, generating the evidence that advances both. Salim Hayek, MD, thinks it’s time to add a new archetype to that tradition.
“We talk about physician scientists, but now I think we need to talk about physician technologists, who have that interest and that we consolidate together into what I call the AI center,” said Dr. Hayek, vice president, chief transformation officer, and interim chair of internal medicine at The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “We have an AI Center that comprises these stakeholders and we build our own products.”
The distinction matters more than it might appear. A physician technologist is not simply a clinician who uses technology; they are someone with genuine fluency in both medicine and engineering, capable of identifying clinical problems, translating them into technical requirements, and working alongside software developers to build solutions. The profile is rare. When Dr. Hayek arrived at UTMB, he set out to find and consolidate those people.
The result is UTMB’s AI Center, an internal unit that brings together engineers, physician technologists, and clinical stakeholders under a single organizational roof. The center operates on two tracks: building proprietary tools internally, and running a structured evaluation process for external vendors.
“We have companies come and present to us their products, and we gauge the potential for collaboration, the potential for building together,” Dr. Hayek said. “It’s done in a very strategic way based on that initial vision — how do we lift the burdens from our physicians, from our administrative staff? How do we make our current workforce more effective?”
That vision-first discipline is what separates the center from a typical IT procurement function. Rather than evaluating technology on its own terms, UTMB screens it against a defined set of problems: administrative burden, access bottlenecks, low-value care, physician scope misalignment. Products that don’t map to those problems don’t advance, regardless of how impressive the demo.
The model has already yielded an automated AI referral triage system that routes incoming patients to the right provider based on urgency and clinical complexity. Launched in January and rolling out across the department of medicine, it represents the highest-value application of AI — not the frontier diagnostics that attract the most attention, but the operational plumbing that determines whether the system actually functions.
“What I’m looking forward to in a year is significant return on investment in our development of the AI referral triage, and we want to see improvement in access,” said Dr. Hayek. “We want to see the sickest patients get seen first and get the care they need. We want to see the right downstream utilization. We want to see surgeons busy doing what they do best and our specialists seeing the right patients.”
The triage tool is already creating value for the health system and scaling out this strategy–developing tools that will have an immediate impact–will be critical going forward.
“This is not just a long-term impact tool. It will impact us in the short term as well as the long term, but it will have an immediate short term impact and I’m very excited to see what it’s going to look like,” said Dr. Hayek.
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