Prime Time Living 6.14.26 - Flipbook - Page 14
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| Sunday, June 14, 2026
TECHNOLOGY
AI’s Positive Impact
on Health Care
A once skeptical physician
now embraces AI
By Margit B. Weisgal, Contributing Writer
D
r. Robert Wachter is professor and chair of the department of medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco, where he is also the Lynne and Marc
Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine, and the Holly Smith Distinguished
Professor in Science and Medicine. He has appeared on Modern Healthcare Magazine’s
list of the 50 most influential physician-executives in the U.S. more than a dozen times;
he was #1 on the list in 2015.
Thus, when the Commonwealth Club
World Affairs of California sought a
speaker, he was the first choice. Why?
His sixth book, published on February
3, 2026, is titled A Giant Leap: How AI
Is Transforming Healthcare and What
That Means for Our Future.
An elected member of the prestigious National Academy of Medicine,
he coined the term “hospitalist” and is
considered the father of the hospitalist
field, the fastest-growing specialty in
the history of modern medicine. Many
baby boomers remember when our
physicians did rounds, visiting us after
surgery when we were hospitalized for
a few days, even for a tonsillectomy. No
longer. Hospitalists are now in charge
of patients. And the world has continued to shift with many surgeries being
done on an outpatient basis.
However, those who were paying
attention to the technical leaps (pun
intended) and bounds, expected health
care to be at the top of the list of what
needed – actually required – modernization. It didn’t quite happen. One
of Wachter’s earlier books was titled
The Digital Doctor, covering the initial
foray of hospitals and medical practices adopting Artificial Intelligence and
the problems it ran into.
There was, he admits, an improvement in record-keeping, not really an
improvement in patient care. Actually, it
made patient care worse because now
the clinician is staring at the computer
and not looking at the patient.
As the medical establishment adopted Electronic Health Records (EHR), on
the plus side, for the first time, notes,
prescriptions and test orders were all
readable. EHRs were good in some
ways but, as mentioned above, didn’t
really improve patient care.
The Digital Doctor pointed out the
negatives, and his remembrance was
identical to mine. I took over my mother’s health care and once the EHRs
were introduced, her primary care physician (PCP) stopped looking at her.
At all. His complete focus was on the
laptop on his desk, filling in information or checking off questions that had
options. This was not what AI was supposed to do. Wachter reiterated that
concept. “After its introduction, no one
ever said ‘this was great and we don’t
need anything more to improve health
care.’”
Then, on November 30, 2022, the day
Open AI’s ChatGPT was introduced to
the public, and, from then on, Wachter
couldn’t say enough good things. You
can almost hear the awe in his voice. “It
was a WOW moment, not just because
I tried this new version of Generative AI.
It was clear the tech could do remarkable things. I knew the health care system I worked in for over 40 years was in
desperate need of a digital transformation and it was the combination of this
tool and the remarkable needs we have
in health care.
“I began entering prompts: Who
pitched in the final game of the 1969
World Series? Draft a 150-word synopsis of the Watergate scandal for
middle-grade readers. Write a poem
about Dr. Robert Wachter in the style
of Shakespeare.
“The answers weren’t all perfect,
but they were awfully good, some
jaw-droppingly so. I wasn’t alone in
my reaction. Within two months of its
launch, one hundred million people
were using ChatGPT, the fastest adoption curve of any technology in modern
history.”
Predictions that AI will take over the
role of physicians are probably overstated; much of what those in health
care do is special and if doctors and
nurses were going to lose their jobs,
