SAN FRANCISCO, November 29, 2023 — The arrival of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, sparked widespread excitement about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), but veteran healthcare leaders questioned whether this technology would finally disrupt an industry historically resistant to change.
Healthcare’s History of Tech Resistance
A look at why digital transformation has been slow to take hold in medicine.
“Apart from education, no other industry has sidestepped the forces of digital disruption like healthcare,” writes Robert Wachter in “A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.” As chair of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, located in the heart of the GenAI revolution, Dr. Wachter is uniquely positioned to assess the impact of emerging technologies on the field.
Dr. Wachter brings firsthand experience to the discussion, having witnessed previous attempts to modernize healthcare. Before 2008, he remembers a decidedly analog world within hospitals: clinicians relied on handwritten notes, paper orders, and bulky charts that physically occupied nursing stations. The initial push to digitize these records involved leading tech companies attempting to create what are now known as electronic health records (EHRs). “Every one of these flamed out,” he reports.
Will AI finally overcome healthcare’s resistance to digital change? The industry’s unique complexities—regulation, patient safety, and established workflows—have historically slowed adoption of new technologies.
The failed EHR implementations weren’t due to a lack of technological capability, but rather a misunderstanding of the clinical workflow. Dr. Wachter suggests that the early attempts focused too much on the technology itself, and not enough on how it would integrate into the daily lives of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals.
This history of setbacks casts a long shadow over the current wave of enthusiasm for GenAI. While the potential benefits are undeniable, Dr. Wachter’s experience serves as a cautionary tale, reminding us that technological innovation alone is not enough to transform healthcare.
