#18 - Robert Wachter: the role of AI in healthcare's digital transformation

Dec 22 2023 • 25 mins

In this episode, Dr. Robert Wachter sits down for an in-depth conversation with Dr. Aaron Neinstein, chief medical officer at Notable. Among other things, the two discuss:

* Why the latest AI innovations are a true game-changer for healthcare

* What most healthcare organizations can learn from the Atlanta Braves

* How to balance safety and benefits when it comes to AI

* And much more.

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Dr. Robert M. Wachter is chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine, which leads the nation in grants from the National Institutes of Health and is consistently ranked as one of the nation’s best. His primary interests are health care quality, safety and policy. He coined the term hospitalist in 1996 and is widely credited as the founder and academic leader of the hospitalist specialty in medicine, the fastest-growing specialty in U.S. medical history.

Wachter is an international leader in health care safety and quality. He has published more than 250 articles and six books on health care topics, including Understanding Patient Safety, the world’s top-selling safety primer, now in its third edition. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Wachter received his medical degree at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed a residency in internal medicine, serving as chief resident, at UCSF. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at Stanford University, and he studied patient safety in England in 2011 as a Fulbright Scholar.

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Outline

Here are the timestamps for this episode.

(00:00) - Intro

(01:24) - Your book Digital Doctor from 10 years ago - what did you get right and wrong?

(03:33) - Avoiding unintended consequences with digital in healthcare

(04:33) - How the industry is cautiously approaching GPT-4 and new AI innovations

(05:00) - The biggest opportunity in healthcare? Focusing on this area

(05:40) - How the Atlanta Braves compare to the average healthcare organization

(06:29) - Have GPT-4 and LLMs helped us move beyond the ‘AI winter?’

(10:19) - Why the latest AI innovations represent a step-change for healthcare

(11:43) - What problems in healthcare are most ripe for solving with AI?