Signals, notes, and essays about AI, health technology inside and outside healthcare, and how consumer health tech is changing the healthcare system.
Eighteen percent of AI chatbot users have adjusted a medication based on a chatbot conversation. No doctor, no clinical oversight, no documentation anywhere in the healthcare system. The prescribed regimen and the actual regimen are diverging more and more, via a channel that is invisible to healthcare.
I speak with at least 100 healthcare leaders each year. They track everything — length of stay, readmissions, OR utilization, revenue cycle velocity. The one thing they're not tracking at all? The demand leaving the system entirely. And a Harvard finding that should have set off alarms six years ago has gone almost completely unnoticed.
Happy to discuss healthcare growth, primary care’s decline, consumer health tech, and self-driving cars with the very well-informed Scott Becker, in this episode of Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.
Clinical AI can make doctors more efficient and reduce burnout. But wearables, GLP-1 drugs, direct-to-consumer labs, and AI health assistants are doing something far more radical: they’re making many traditional doctor visits unnecessary. The real disruption in healthcare is already happening outside the exam room.
Stanford researchers gave AI radiology test questions without the images. The AI aced them anyway. Most people think that's a knock against AI. I think it's telling us something about the images.
Hospital CEOs are saying they’re ready to replace radiologists with AI for first reads. The radiology community has spent nine years saying that would never happen. They can’t both be right.
40% of U.S. physicians use OpenEvidence. DoxGPT had 300,000 clinician users last quarter. UpToDate just launched Expert AI. Not one of these tools appears to have been independently tested for accuracy or safety. A profession built on evidence-based medicine is adopting AI with no evidence.
The Economist says healthcare has "proved resistant to treatment from disrupters." If that's true, why has per capita spending growth been falling for fifty years? Why have primary care visits dropped 24%? Because the Economist, and the healthcare system, don't count disruption that doesn't call itself healthcare.
A Washington Post op-ed argues that Utah's AI prescription renewal pilot rests on thin evidence. Fair. But the human renewal process it's replacing has never been rigorously validated either. We're applying a standard to AI that we've never applied to the human baseline.
Medicine has a well-established model for distributing liability across physicians and tools: whoever caused the failure bears the liability. AI vendors have quietly opted out of it — and the contracts they're asking health systems to sign reflect that.
OpenAI and Anthropic both launched enterprise healthcare AI offerings last month. OpenAI's is more complete — a ready-to-use product for clinicians plus an API for developers. Anthropic's is developer-focused, with connectors to healthcare databases like CMS and ICD-10. Both will eventually offer the full stack. The question is what you need now.
In the first week of January 2026, Utah, and OpenAI each drew a different line around health AI — and liability. Utah’s Doctronic pilot treats AI like a clinician, with malpractice coverage and preserved remedies. OpenAI adds medical-record syncing under unchanged disclaimers and a $100 cap.