Bob Wachter

Bob Wachter, who is chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has been telling us that AI has recently been proven super helpful to health care providers by acting as a digital scribe and cutting down on other paperwork.

So that's great.

But how about some more ambitious uses of AI in health care?

For that, we will go to Pierre Elias.

He did research with Wachter at UCSF, took leave from medical school to work for an AI healthcare startup, then went back and got his medical degree in 2016.

And what is Elias up to now?

Okay, that's the part I want to hear more about.

What does that mean exactly, to be medical director for artificial intelligence at a big urban hospital chain like that?

How big is it, and is it just your organization and all its branches, or does it go beyond your organization?

When you talk about building out this network of people like yourself, give an example of a particular type of project.

And it's hard to imagine that you couldn't have known about the disease when he had been A, in an emergency department at a different hospital, and then B, sent to you.

How often is that performed on a healthy patient?

Did you identify that relationship?

Or is it just that the machine learning helped you find the cases in which one was related to the other?

Oh boy, that's not very good.

Did you then use the two in tandem, the AI and the humans?

When you look at your colleagues, who's embracing AI or deep learning, as you sometimes call it?

Who's ignoring it?

Who's maybe actively opposing it and so on?

Do you feel like you're sort of at the front edge of a movement?