On November 5, OvationLab ran ACE Immersion, a full-day, clinician-only program that opened the Eudēmonia Summit in West Palm Beach. ACE stands for applied clinical education. Two disclosures belong up front: Ultralight sponsored the day, and one of us, Dr. Lexi Gonzales, organized it as OvationLab's Director of Clinical Programs and AI. The day after, Sunita sat down with Lexi to talk through what worked.
Lexi built ACE to fill the implementation gap between clinician learning and patient care. Accredited CME protects its rigor by keeping products at arm's length, and ACCME guidance asks presenters to use generic names and to list several companies whenever a trade name is needed. Brand-sponsored education names products, but clinicians often doubt the science due to presenter bias. Lexi wanted "a way in the middle ground." Her answer was a playbook for every session, with the speaker's thesis, the biomarker panels, the specialty labs, the signals to watch, and the interventions, including doses and brands.
The people in the room explain why that matters. Sunita met a clinician coming from psychiatry who is opening a longevity practice, and whose patients now ask about hormone therapy and other areas outside her training. She is getting that training. What she needs is a faster way to put it into practice, which is the question every conference leaves behind: what happens on Monday?
The panel worth bringing home
The day closed with "The Mother of Longevity," a panel that put fertility, pregnancy, and perimenopause experts on one stage: Emily Stone Rydbom, MDH, BCHN, CNP; Michelle Leary, ND, FMCP-M, ABAAHP; Monique Class, MS, APRN-BC, FMCP-M; and Lexi Gonzales, ND, MS, FMCP-M. Birth data explains why those chapters belong together now. Women 40 to 44 were the only age group whose birth rate rose in 2024, and that rate has climbed almost continuously since 1985. For a growing share of patients, postpartum overlaps the start of the menopause transition, and the panel kept returning to a practical question: is this symptom postpartum, perimenopause, or both?
Lexi's takeaway was about cadence. An annual visit gives a snapshot, she said, and these women need more frequent check-ins throughout their life stages, especially the postpartum phase, with cardiometabolic signals caught as early as preconception. A 2021 American Heart Association statement backs the urgency, finding that six pregnancy complications raise a woman's later risk of cardiovascular disease. The panel also discussed how a mother's health before conception shapes her child's metabolic health, which gives our readers a second reason to start following these patients early.
Why most playbooks stay in the folder
A good protocol still has to be translated before a patient feels it. Someone builds the lab panel, places the orders, books the body composition scan, and writes the note explaining why the patient is doing any of it. That work lands on the clinician right after a conference, when she is least ready for it. Lexi said people underestimate "how exhausting it is" to spend days absorbing new science, plus the side conversations about how everyone else plans to use it, only to return to a packed patient schedule to make up for the days we missed in the clinic to attend the conference.
So the playbooks wait. Lexi estimates that without help, maybe 10% of a conference's takeaways make it into practice, because you immediately apply what you’ve learned to that one patient that pops into your mind as soon as you hear a similar case presentation on stage. She has her own evidence: years of conference handouts, presentations, and notes that "have just gone untouched." Meanwhile the postpartum patient stays on the annual cadence and the new panel never gets built.
What happened when the playbook went into the chart
For ACE, we loaded the session playbooks into Ultralight's knowledge base. Lexi uploaded one and asked for a plan for a demo patient. The system drafted tasks to build the biomarker panel, book the body composition scan, and order the supplements, and it wrote the patient-facing explanations in her voice. Clinicians who stopped by the booth ran the same demo, and several said some version of "I can actually bring this back." Some are testing it after the conference.
Every draft waits for clinician review, and the decisions stay with the clinician. In Lexi's words, handing off the manual application of the playbook means "not giving away any sort of clinical authority." We have no outcome data yet. What we have is a demo, a group of clinicians testing it, and a lot of handouts that never got this far.
What to try this week
Block 30 minutes on your first Monday back. Fatigue is highest right after a conference and the details fade fast, so turn one playbook into something runnable before the week fills up.
Pick one playbook and one patient. Choose a protocol from the last conference you attended, ACE or any other, and one patient it fits.
Break it into four parts. Labs and assessments, interventions with doses, the follow-up cadence, and the patient explanation. Most handouts skip the last one.
Build it once. Save the panel, the order set, and the explanation as reusable templates in your EHR, so the second patient takes minutes.
Ask about pregnancy history at intake. Gestational diabetes, high blood pressure in pregnancy, preterm delivery, and pregnancy loss all belong on the form. When one is present, screen blood pressure, lipids, and glucose on a set schedule, and treat that history as a reason for closer cardiometabolic follow-up.
Keep AI inside the clinical record. If AI drafts the plan, use a HIPAA-compliant clinical tool and review every order before it goes out.
Have the script ready. "I came back from a conference with a newer approach for women at your stage. Here's the plan, what we'll check, and when we'll check it again."
Be a modern clinician with the help of Ultralight, the AI-native EHR built specifically for functional, integrative, and longevity medicine. We've recently launched wearables integrations and improved AI-native clinical workflows. Get in touch to see the latest updates.
Watch: Sunita and Lexi on ACE at Eudēmonia
The day after ACE, Sunita Mohanty, Founder and CEO of Ultralight (LinkedIn), sat down with Dr. Lexi Gonzales, ND, Director of Clinical Programs and AI at OvationLab (LinkedIn), to talk through the playbooks, the women's health panel, and what clinicians took home.
In the news
Pelacarsen cut Lp(a) by 78% and did not reduce cardiovascular events. Lp(a)HORIZON, published November 7 in NEJM, randomized 8,350 patients with a prior cardiovascular event and Lp(a) of 70 mg/dL or higher to monthly pelacarsen or placebo. At 12 months, Lp(a) was 77.7% lower with the drug. Over a median 4.7 years, major cardiovascular events occurred in 12.3% versus 12.1% (HR 1.02, 95% CI 0.90 to 1.15), and Novartis has discontinued the program. Investigators noted that baseline risk factors were already well controlled, and outcome trials of other Lp(a)-lowering drugs, including olpasiran and lepodisiran, are still running. Patients we have tested for Lp(a) may ask what this means for them. The result applies to one drug in patients who already had an event, and the practical response is to keep managing the risk factors we can treat today.
Patients in a new study rated doctors who disclosed AI use as less warm and less competent, so how we describe our AI use matters. In a vignette study in npj Digital Medicine, 1,030 U.S. adults viewed hypothetical family-doctor ads. Doctors who disclosed AI use were rated lower on warmth and competence, and participants were less willing to book, pay, travel, or wait to see them. Participants under 45 were the harshest. These were stated reactions to an ad rather than real patient choices, and the authors suggest emphasizing physician responsibility and shared decision-making, an idea they did not test. When we tell patients we use AI, we can lead with what stays ours: we review every draft and make the decisions.
HHS will allow 503A compounding of six peptides under ten conditions, and comments close November 13. The interim enforcement discretion policy, announced October 28, covers BPC-157, TB-500, Epitalon, Semax, KPV, and MOTS-c, each limited to specified routes. Per Holland & Knight, every condition must be met, including API from an FDA-registered facility with a certificate of analysis, a single peptide per product, and a patient-specific prescription. The policy does not add the peptides to the 503A bulks list, and HHS can revise or revoke it. Comments are open on Regulations.gov under Docket HHS-OASH-2026-0496. For those of us who prescribe these peptides, the step this week is to confirm our compounding pharmacy can document each condition and to keep every prescription patient-specific.
Upcoming Conferences & Events
Dec 11-13, A4M Longevity Fest · Las Vegas, NV · The biggest longevity event in the U.S. The room spans clinicians, industry, founders, and the people building next year's platforms, and the connections from this one tend to compound through the rest of your year. Save $100 on registration with code Longevity26. OvationLab and Ultralight will be there!
Feb 19-20, CALM 2027 · Fort Lauderdale, FL · NuBioAge's Clinical Application of Longevity Medicine meeting for physicians, NPs, pharmacists, and clinical teams putting longevity medicine into practice. Ultralight will be there!
Know of an event we should add? Reply and tell us.
Until next week
A conference playbook helps a patient only once it reaches her chart. Pick one protocol, build it once, and let the second patient take minutes instead of an evening.
Reply and tell us which conference protocol you have been meaning to put into practice. Know a colleague who came home from a conference with a folder of handouts? Forward this to them.
Until next week, keep building the practice you imagined when you started.
Sunita & Dr. G