12 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Health Care

You may be familiar with the name Robert Wachter, M.D. He's written six books and hundreds of journal articles; he chairs the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco; and he's a leading advocate for patient safety. He's perhaps best known for having coined the term "hospitalist," and for having defined and promoted hospital medicine as a recognized primary care subspecialty. In a new book, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015), Wachter takes a deep dive into the turbulent waters of medical technology as informed by artificial intelligence, or AI. "While computers are preventing many medical errors," he observes, "they are also causing new kinds of mistakes, some of them whoppers." It was one of those -- at his own institution, UCSF -- that inspired Wachter to examine where AI has got us and where it's taking us.