Humanity and the Benefits of Artificial Intelligence

In the nearly 20 years since I started medical school, I’ve seen the practice of medicine undergo a wholesale technological transformation. Take medical records as a simple example. I am 100% certain that today’s medical students are much slower walkers than me. Why? Because the days of sprinting on rounds to get ahead of the white coat phalanx, pull down a cabinet and open a three-ring binder chart to the next blank page before the intern reaches the door ended a decade ago.

Today’s medical students are instead both blessed and cursed with EMRs and patient care technologies that track and trend every aspect of the inpatient and outpatient course, demanding hours of tedious, field-driven data entry while yielding treasure troves of mineable new information.