When the Machine Is Almost Always Right, Who Is Still Thinking?

A lone baker cracking an egg at a small table under a spotlight on a dark, empty theater stage, symbolizing "judgment theater" and human oversight in healthcare AI adoption.

Every few episodes we stop interviewing and start synthesizing. This is our seventh Reflections episode and our fifty-first overall, covering six conversations: Mika Newton on interoperability, Peter Embi on monitoring deployed AI, Vimla Patel on clinical reasoning, Renee Deehan on trustworthy consumer health AI, Christine Dymek on AI literacy, and Jeremy Harper on healthcare’s broken…

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Healthcare Skipped Its Early Adopters

A large crowd of runners competing on a track, metaphorically representing healthcare's rushed adoption of ambient AI scribes and ambient documentation.

Every technology healthcare ever adopted arrived on the same schedule. A bleeding-edge 5% went first, broke things, and told everyone what they learned. The majority followed, and the laggards came when they had no choice. It is slow, and easy to resent. It is also how a field learns what a new tool actually does.…

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AI Literacy Is Not a Pamphlet

A person in work boots on a concrete ledge preparing to step onto a paper bridge over fog, symbolizing the fragile gap between basic AI literacy and practical healthcare AI implementation.

Chris Dymek started in philosophy. She passed her doctoral exams, looked at friends taking one-year appointments in places they didn’t want to live, and moved into computer science instead. Programmer, systems analyst, director of re-engineering at a utility, a doctorate in organizational change, CTO of a small health organization in Tucson, then EHR implementation in…

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The AI That Refuses to Guess

Conceptual illustration of symbolic AI and human review in healthcare: a researcher stamps an approved paper at the base of a paper tornado representing clinical trial data.

Scroll wellness social media at one in the morning, as Renee Deehan admits she sometimes does, and you’ll find an endless stream of confident advice. Most of it rests on a single study with sixteen participants. “That’s great that that study said MCT oil was going to lower your cholesterol,” she says, “because there’s six…

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