Archive for February 2026
What Happens When Your Healthcare AI Framework Meets the Real World?
We’ve spent 24 episodes of Practical AI in Healthcare building a way of thinking about what works and what doesn’t in healthcare AI. We’ve identified themes. Named frameworks. Developed a shared vocabulary. Then we tried to check whether any of it held up. Turns out we both saw the mismatch. The disagreement was about whether…
Read MoreThe EHR Was Just the Scaffolding: Bob Wachter on Why AI in Healthcare Is Different This Time
Bob Wachter has seen this movie before. As Chair of Medicine at UCSF, he watched the electronic health record arrive with enormous promise and deliver enormous frustration. Physicians became expensive data-entry clerks. Patients noticed their doctors staring at screens instead of at them. His 2015 book, The Digital Doctor, captured what went wrong. So when…
Read MoreWhen Language Reveals What’s Coming: AI-Enabled Early Detection of Psychosis
The warning signs of psychosis can appear years—sometimes decades—before a first episode. Kids show up at community mental health clinics with diffuse symptoms. Anxious. Withdrawn. Something’s off, but nothing’s definitive. They get bounced between providers, misdiagnosed, treated for the wrong thing. Meanwhile, subtle changes in how they organize their thoughts are already visible, hiding in…
Read MoreThe Definitional Chaos Hiding Under Real-World Evidence
In 2008, about five companies sold access to real-world healthcare data. Today, that number exceeds one hundred—and the growth hasn’t made real-world evidence easier to produce. It’s made the definitional problem worse. “Does the data mean what you think it means?” That’s how the FDA defines reliability in its 2021 guidance on real-world data. And…
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