Bob Wachter

And if I'm seeing you and you have a past history of having had a blood clot 20 years ago, and that's on page 397 of your 600-page record, and I miss that,

I may not make the right decision about whether you need a medicine to try to prevent a blood clot if you're going to be in the hospital.

One of the points I make over and over in the book, I use Biden's old line, don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative.

So even if this chart summarization is imperfect, and the data says right now it's very good, but not 100% perfect.

I recalled in the book a patient I saw a long time ago.

The patient had a history of a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot to the lung, which is really a bad thing to have had and probably means you're gonna be on a blood thinner, which can be dangerous for the rest of your life.

I happened to have a few minutes before I saw the patient,

I'm doing a little head scratching like, oh, that's funny.

The patient had a history of a pulmonary embolism.

The patient had no risk factors, no family history.

That's kind of unusual.

And so I'm flipping through the chart.

And finally, I found where this history of a pulmonary embolism, which we often shorten as PE, came from.

The other thing we shorten as PE sometimes is physical exam.

And the patient, 20 years ago, had a physical exam, which the doctor labeled as PE and wrote the patient's physical exam under that.

The next doctor, probably in a rush, looked, saw the initials PE, and on the patient's problem list, now the patient had a pulmonary embolism.

And that stuck to the patient like gum on a shoe for the rest of their life if I hadn't caught it.

So for all our concern about hallucinating or bullshitting by AI, human intelligence is quite fallible, we should say.

Intelligence and time.

This was not a matter of someone being not intelligent.