Bob Wachter

Was it just because you were doing internal medicine in a hospital and you kind of expanded that practice?

Yeah, I had a boss who's a very smart, strategic guy who said the way we organize hospital care is the way we've done it for 100 years.

And that can't be right.

Let's think of a new way of organizing hospital care.

Because at the time, the typical model was your doctor who took care of you in clinic also took care of you in the hospital, which makes some sense from a continuity standpoint, but just can't work.

It's got a physics problem.

You can't be in two places at the same time.

And if you think about it, the fields of emergency medicine and critical care medicine didn't exist 50 years ago.

Then people decided there needed to be a separate specialty with a specialist being a generalist who's a specialist in this place.

So we developed this idea of a separate doctor to be the hospital doctor.

And lo and behold, it became the fastest growing specialty in history.

Within a few minutes of speaking with Wachter, you get a sense of how his brain works.

He is drawn to categorical sorting and operational competence, all of which has been particularly useful in his latest extracurricular endeavor.

It's a book, his sixth, called A Giant Leap, How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.

When you look at health care, people sometimes say to me, why are you people such Luddites?

Are you kidding me?

Come to a modern hospital.

We have technology everywhere.

Go to the radiology department, cardiology, surgery.

But we have not used general purpose technologies to transform the way we do our work.