Bob Wachter

And famously, he says, two ways, gradually, then suddenly.

So that's us.

I mean, I think we have the gradually part down pat.

We now have computers, which is great, but we are the largest users of fax machines today.

In the country, we finally have ditched the pagers after the drug dealers did.

They were way ahead of us.

So, yeah, we are very sluggish in adopting new tools, but we have gone digital.

I wrote a book 10 years ago called The Digital Doctor, which was really about our transition from paper to digital.

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.