Bob Wachter
speaker
553 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 24 Apr
Bob Wachter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
Showing 121–140 of 553 · page 7 of 28
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