TMC Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy

At TMC, our primary focus is providing exceptional, compassionate care to our patients. To help us achieve this, we thoughtfully integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into specific areas of our practice.

We believe in complete transparency about how these tools are used. More importantly, we firmly believe that our deliberate, boundaried use of AI actively enables us to deliver a higher standard of care. By allowing technology to handle administrative burdens, we free up our human team to focus entirely on you.

Our People-First Guarantee

Recent trends in the wider business sector have shown companies attempting to replace human staff with AI, often resulting in a worse experience for both employees and customers, alongside severe risks of AI "hallucinations" (making up information). We have been cautious as AI capabilities have increased, and we have equally observed and learned from these industry missteps.

The most critical aspect of our AI policy is this: AI does not make clinical decisions or replace human interaction at TMC. Whilst we use technology to support our daily operations, your healthcare is in human hands.

  • Human Expertise: Every diagnosis, treatment plan, and clinical choice is made by our qualified healthcare professionals.

  • MDT Oversight: When needed, complex decisions are reviewed and managed by our Clinical Mentorship Team to ensure you receive the highest standard of collaborative, human-led care.

  • Values-Driven: AI does not dictate how we run our business. TMC operates fundamentally on our core values. AI is simply a tool we use to support our team, never a replacement for human empathy, ethical judgement, or personalised care.

How AI Enhances Your Care

We strictly limit our use of AI to administrative, back-office, and supportive tasks specifically to combat the immense pressures facing our profession. Recent studies highlight that relentless workloads and overwhelming administrative duties leave UK physiotherapists physically and emotionally drained, which can directly impact the quality of patient care (Skamagki et al., 2025). This deliberate boundary with AI is exactly what allows us to elevate the care we provide and be better clinicians.

Currently, we use AI to improve your experience in the following ways:

  • More Attentive Consultations: We utilise secure AI transcription and drafting tools to assist our clinicians in taking notes. By drastically reducing the time spent looking at a screen and typing, our clinicians can maintain eye contact, listen actively, and remain fully present with you during your appointment—giving you their fullest attention. All AI-drafted notes are meticulously reviewed, edited, and approved by your clinician to ensure complete accuracy and safeguard against any AI-generated errors.

  • Responsive Out-of-Hours Support: To ensure you are never left entirely without support, we use an AI-powered answering service outside of regular office hours. This system intelligently triages calls and takes detailed messages, ensuring your enquiry is organised and ready for our human team to prioritise the moment the clinic reopens.

  • Connecting with Our Community: We use AI tools to analyse data trends and inform our marketing strategies. This helps us communicate our services more effectively and reach the people who need our care the most, all without compromising patient privacy.

Accountability and Professionalism

Osteopathy and Chiropractic are self-regulating professions, resulting in uneven levels of clinical effectiveness and ethics.

By contrast, physiotherapy has a professional body (PhysioFirst), a royal charter (The Chartered Society of Physiotherapists), is externally regulated by the HCPC and integrated into the gold standard of healthcare, the NICE Guidelines. Though, sadly, even this cannot guarantee that all physios are ethical and effective, it certainly helps.

TMC is a physiotherapy practice.

TMC is within and engaged with all of these professional and clinical excellence bodies. TMC is in a deep, expert ethical and legal ecosystem, and we actively use it to help us act both ethically and to pursue clinical effectiveness. Around us, we have professional bodies and guidelines that help us decide on an AI policy and revise and update it as technology changes.

Founders John and Ashleigh actually also have unique backgrounds which have helped them engage intentionally with AI. Ashleigh studied Forensic Science before becoming a physio, giving her a strong basis of legality, objectivity, and transparency. Before becoming a physio, John held a PhD in Media and Communications, specialising in how social connection, power and language either block or enable people to act in the world. This has given them valuable tools to evaluate AI, its ethical deployment, and its limitations. They founded TMC intentionally and with core values. It is these values, plus their professional ecosystem, which guide the use or non-use of AI. Read TMC’s core values here.

Privacy and Security

We take your privacy seriously. Any AI tools used by TMC, particularly those involved in drafting patient notes, are fully vetted for security and comply with all relevant healthcare data protection regulations, including the UK GDPR. Your personal and medical data is not used to train public AI models.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about how we use technology and AI at TMC, we welcome the conversation. Please feel free to reach out to our team during standard office hours.

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