Bob Wachter

Who did I talk to?

I tried to find interesting companies and interesting people doing cool stuff.

And when I spoke to them, I asked them, who else should I speak to?

And they told me about other interesting people.

I know the world of clinical medicine well.

I know the world of academic medicine well and medical education.

I live in San Francisco, so I'm surrounded by technologists.

I advise a bunch of tech companies.

So in each of those areas, I knew a fair amount to get started and knew some of the players, but I had to go deeper.

The first chapter in the book is called An Overnight Revolution, 50 Years in the Making.

Can you just talk for a moment about what happened during those 50 years, the successes, the failures, and why it's been such a slow boil?

Yeah, I can do it quickly if we talk successes, and it'll take longer to do failures.

Slow boil is a couple of things.

One is people are treating AI in healthcare like it's new.

It is not.

In the 70s and 80s, AI became a thing, and there was a lot of interest in medicine and artificial intelligence.

If you think about it, what does a doctor do?

What did I spend eight or 10 years going to school and residency and fellowship learning to do?

It's be intelligent to take a whole body of information and

symptoms and lab tests and all that, match it against a body of information, the medical literature and textbooks, and come up with a diagnosis and a treatment.