Silicon Valley’s move-fast-and-break-things ethos has collided with medicine’s slow and restrained, follow-the-evidence philosophy.
The reverberations were swift and deep. In its wake: a health care system flooded with new artificial intelligence tools. Imaging algorithms flag subtle abnormalities on mammograms and CT scans. Predictive models forecast no-shows and streamline hospital schedules. There are even a few AI robots poking patients with needles to draw blood. (That one “hasn’t been well received,” John Whyte, the CEO and executive vice president of the American Medical Association, told Straight Arrow News.)
It’s a little bit of a wild, wild west right now,” Whyte said.
Although some AI tools address operational and clinical challenges, many enter practice under lax regulatory pathways that do not require rigorous evidence that they improve outcomes or reduce costs. Oversight frameworks remain in flux, struggling to keep pace with technologies that evolve and scale faster than the systems designed to evaluate them.
