Bob Wachter

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.

So AI was very exciting, but the AI of the day was not ready for prime time for a few reasons.

First of all, it was the old if-then AI.

If a patient has a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes and a fever, they probably have strep throat or mononucleosis.

That works fine for very simple problems, falls apart very quickly, faced with the complexity of real medicine.

The second was all of our data was on paper.

Therefore, if you wanted to use these fancy new AI machines, you had to go to a separate computer and type everything in.

So both of those caused the field to flame out, and AI went away from medicine for about 40 years.

Was this imaging as well or no?

It was early for imaging.

Imaging started in the 80s and 90s.

It was largely around the cognitive work of doctors.

Part of the problem was they started on the hardest problem, and the hardest problem is diagnosis.