Bob Wachter

Coming up after the break, as any new technology spreads, there are the inevitable winners and losers.

The tech companies are playing this as we have no interest in replacing the doctor.

We really want to be a co-pilot.

We want to be your wingman.

But they obviously do want to replace the doctor.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

This is the Freakonomics Radio Guide to Getting Better.

We will be right back.

Many companies are investing many billions of dollars to build out new AI infrastructure in healthcare for all sorts of applications, clinical treatment and risk prediction, drug discovery, revenue and staffing operations, on and on.

There's also one massive incumbent to consider, the electronic health record company Epic, which claims to maintain at least one record for 325 million people.

Here again is Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF and the author of A Giant Leap, How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.

Epic won this market.

This was a little tiny company started by Judy Faulkner in the basement of an apartment off the University of Wisconsin.

She became the most successful female entrepreneur probably in American history.

It's a really remarkable story.

I think they won because they were the best.

The best was partly integration.

Judy's theory of the case was, we're not going to bolt on 37 different tools by a bunch of different companies.

We're going to own the entire thing, and that is going to allow us to provide

an integrated solution, and medicine is so complex and there's so many moving parts that if you don't have an integrated solution, the thing's not going to work very well.