Health Technology

AI in global health has continent-sized blind spots

Health Technology

June 18, 2026

There is no doctor in my village.

I grew up in Logwerle, a small community in Central Equatoria State, South Sudan. When people got sick, they traveled far for care, or they didn’t get care at all. In 2003, my family moved to northern Uganda so I could get an education. I started primary school at Teremunga Primary School in Koboko, completed my O-levels at St. Charles Lwanga, and my A-levels …

AI in health care is a mirror, not a therapist

Matt Hasan, PhD

Health Technology

June 17, 2026

The most unsettling thing about artificial intelligence is not what it can do. It is what people feel when they talk to it.

I keep hearing the same things. “It listens.” “It doesn’t rush me.” “It helps me think.” “It seems to care.” Some people say this with embarrassment, as though confessing a weakness. Others say it with relief. A few say it with something close to gratitude.

These reactions have set …

Why the safest medical AI knows when not to answer

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Health Technology

June 17, 2026

When a recent study in Nature Medicine compared general-purpose AI models with specialized clinical tools, the headline was exactly the kind the technology world likes to see: The generalists came out on top.

The reactions were predictable. Some observers treated the study as proof that specialized clinical software is no longer needed, arguing that bigger and more powerful AI models will always win. Others dismissed the study, pointing out that AI …

When the AI diagnosis arrives before the patient does

Ganesh Asaithambi

Health Technology

June 16, 2026

I will never forget the look on his face. He wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t uncertain. He came into the hospital the way people used to come into courtrooms: with evidence already assembled, a verdict already reached, and very little interest in hearing otherwise. He had consulted an AI program before arriving, which had given him a diagnosis. He had read it, believed it, and arrived not as a patient seeking …

Generalist physicians and AI are a comparative advantage

Jeremy Fish, MD

Health Technology

June 15, 2026

Our culture mythologizes the lone genius (Edison, Einstein, Jobs), systematically erasing the collaborative ecosystems that made their contributions possible. This tendency has had profound consequences. It has contributed to a century-long devaluation of the generalist, the integrative thinker who ranges across domains, synthesizes disparate knowledge, and holds the whole in view while others tend the parts. This essay traces that arc and argues that artificial intelligence (AI) now presents an …

Patients are turning to AI because doctors lack time

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Health Technology

June 15, 2026

An excerpt from Medicine at the Crossroads: Commentaries from a Profession Caught Between Patients, Politics, Technology, and Trust.

An emergency medicine physician writing in the New York Times recently described an interaction she had with an AI chatbot that might be a teaching lesson for our profession. After receiving her own lab results, she tried to discuss them with her physician. She was told a phone call would require …

The case for an AI-native health care platform

Brian Hudes, MD

Health Technology

June 14, 2026

From 1992 to 1995 I was a GI fellow. Nothing on the market made clinical sense for endoscopy reporting. The tools available were designed by people who had apparently never performed a procedure or written a note for one. I met a colleague in Australia, and together we built one of the first Windows-based endoscopy reporting systems in the country.

Microsoft Access. It worked.

It worked well until the United States moved …

You won the lawsuit. Search still says you lost.

Tim Brocklehurst, MBA

Health Technology

June 13, 2026

Kevin Pho has spent two decades making one argument to physicians: Your online reputation does not manage itself. Patients Google you before they call your office. What they find shapes their decision before you say a word. The solution, as he has consistently framed it, is to create content, to claim the top listings rather than leaving them to chance.

That advice is correct. It is also, in one specific and …

AI medical notes are losing the patient story

Paul Vance, DO

Health Technology

June 13, 2026

There was a time when a SOAP note meant something simple and important. It was a shared language among clinicians: Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan, designed to capture what actually happened in the exam room and to communicate it clearly to the next physician who would care for the patient. It was, at its best, a tool for continuity, safety, and professional accountability.

That time is slipping away.

Over the past two decades, …

AI in health care is quietly displacing physicians

Matt Hasan, PhD

Health Technology

June 12, 2026

Every physician knows the feeling. You trained for years to think independently, to assess, to judge. Now you spend more than half your workday staring at a screen, entering data into fields someone else designed, responding to alerts someone else configured. The patient is in front of you. The system is between you.

That experience is not just a workflow frustration. It is a signal of something far more consequential that …

Actual Intelligence: the skill AI cannot replace

Alan P. Feren, MD

Health Technology

June 12, 2026

Artificial intelligence is no longer arriving in medicine. It has arrived. The American Medical Association’s 2026 Physician Survey found that 81 percent of physicians now use AI in their practices, more than double the 38 percent who reported using it in 2023. In three years it went from a minority tool to a default one, concentrated most heavily in documentation and summarization, the workflows closest to how we think.

The same …

AI bias in health care reads the writer, not the symptom

Craig Hauben, MPA

Health Technology

June 11, 2026

A few weeks ago I wrote here about the eGFR race correction, the flawed formula that overestimated kidney function in Black patients for twenty years while clinicians trusted the number on the screen. The piece ended with a warning that the same failure is being rebuilt with AI, minus the part where anyone can inspect the formula. Readers sent back the natural question. If the next eGFR is already …

Clinical documentation workflow is not just an AI fix

Sterling Garde

Health Technology

June 10, 2026

There’s a certain kind of work in health care that never quite fits anywhere. It’s not the structured clinical note. It’s not the templated visit. It’s everything else. The documentation that still matters, but doesn’t fit the system built to hold it.

Most documentation systems in health care are built around a simple assumption: that clinical work is structured, discrete, and tied to a defined patient encounter. That works well in …

Built for physicians, by physicians: our founder story

J. Todd Walker, MD & Justin T. Smith, MD & TurnKey AI Practice

Health Technology

June 7, 2026

My colleague had a vision. Not the kind that comes from a business school classroom or a venture capital pitch competition, but the kind that comes from years of practicing medicine and watching colleagues slowly lose the thing that brought them into this field in the first place. Autonomy. Joy. The feeling that you are actually helping someone, not just generating documentation.

The three of us, my CEO colleague and two …

What the eGFR race correction teaches us about AI

Craig Hauben, MPA

Health Technology

June 5, 2026

The number was wrong for twenty years. Nobody could see it.

For more than twenty years, a number quietly shaped the care of millions of patients. It told nephrologists when to refer. It told transplant committees who qualified for the waitlist. It told primary care physicians which patients were stable, and which were declining.

For Black patients, the number was wrong. By design.

The number was eGFR, and the formula behind it included …

Clinician trust in AI is not a one-time milestone

Susan Grant, DNP, RN

Health Technology

June 3, 2026

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care is reshaping how clinical teams diagnose, document, and deliver care. Adoption is rising quickly, with the American Medical Association reporting that two in three U.S. physicians already use AI tools in practice, a 78 percent increase in just one year. To keep pace with this acceleration, health care organizations must focus on building and maintaining clinical trust in the technology before …

What AI in medicine can and cannot do

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Health Technology

May 31, 2026

The announcement landed the way tech announcements usually do: bold claims, a glossy render, the implication that health care’s problems are basically engineering problems that nobody competent had gotten around to solving.

Elon Musk envisions Optimus, his humanoid AI robot, stepping into medical care. Surgical precision. Universal access. Automation of the tasks that slow medicine down. He has gone so far as to claim Optimus could one day perform “any medical …

Read more…

What AI in medicine can and cannot do

I built clinical decision-support tools at the bedside

Ahmed Elsonbaty, MD

Health Technology

May 31, 2026

For most of my career I was an unlikely candidate to build software. I am a consultant cardiac anesthesiologist. My world was the operating room, the bypass machine, the bleeding patient, the next case.

What changed wasn’t ambition. It was a quiet realization: Life had become loud and fast, and I no longer had time to sit down, open a textbook, and read the way I once did. And I started …

Physicians must shape AI in medicine, not watch it

Sonal Patel, MD

Health Technology

May 30, 2026

Physicians need to demand a seat at the table in deciding how artificial intelligence is integrated into medicine. This is not a luxury or a branding slogan; it is a necessity. If physicians remain engaged, AI can become a powerful tool. If we disengage, we risk allowing others to define medicine on our behalf.

AI is already here. It is being used in documentation, diagnostics, risk prediction, imaging, scheduling, prior authorization, …

3 fixes for primary care access in the ChatGPT era

Payam Zamani, MD

Health Technology

May 28, 2026

A new patient in her 40s recently walked into one of our clinics with a printout of a ChatGPT conversation. For three days, she had been typing her symptoms into the chatbot, describing chest tightness and a fatigue that was not going away, asking whether she should be worried.

The reason she turned to AI was straightforward. She had tried to schedule a primary care appointment with her previous provider and …