Bob Wachter

That book is a very grumpy book.

It's like, how the hell did we go from paper to digital and in some ways make things worse, in some ways make the lives of both patients and doctors harder?

Just digitizing the record helped in certain ways.

Got rid of doctor's handwriting, the kind of perennial joke.

You know, when I do an electronic prescription, it can land at Walgreens or CVS.

That is massively better and safer.

Two people can look at the chart at the same time.

There are lots of good things about it, but it was not enough to transform medicine.

And in some ways, as I said, it made it worse.

The giant leap really is the combination of the magic of the new AI meeting a healthcare system that's in desperate need of change and everybody knows it.

We really are about to have our suddenly moment when healthcare is actually transformed after tiptoeing our way toward this over the last 10 or 15 years to make it better and safer, more accessible, more satisfying for everybody, both patients and clinicians.

And I think eventually less expensive, although that's hard to ask.

My sense is that in writing this book, you, a busy and accomplished person, decided to become even busier and accomplish something else.

And it seems as though you sort of got yourself a graduate degree in healthcare AI by speaking with all these healthcare professionals.

administrators, tech firms, investors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Can you just talk about what this journey slash process was like for you, why you decided to undertake it, and then who you actually did spend time speaking with?

The things I was reading were written by technologists, and I don't think they understood the big picture, the policy, the politics, the economics.

And so my wife, who's a journalist and writes for The New York Times, said, the only way you're going to get this right is to do it journalistically.

And I said, what does that mean?

She said, you're going to have to go and talk to a lot of people.