Bob Wachter

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.

We use it to transform the way we do a procedure or the way we treat a disease.

And thank goodness for that, because we're much better at that than we used to be.

So why is health care delivery still so sloppy?

There are a lot of reasons that we are pretty static.

The fixed costs are very high to get into the business.

It's almost impossible for a startup to build and launch a new hospital.

The incumbents are quite powerful, although you could argue that's true for a lot of other industries, but doctors, nurses, et cetera, are powerful.

The economics are really funky.