We're thrilled to announce that Dr. Robert Wachter, physician, author, and one of healthcare's most influential thought leaders on AI, is joining our team at Qualified Health as a Senior Advisor. If you've been paying attention to the AI in healthcare conversation, you already know that Bob is Chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine and has spent his career at the intersection of medicine, technology, and systems thinking. Throughout his career, Bob has demonstrated the ability to see around corners and understand where the next major advance sits. He did that with hospital medicine (he coined the term “hospitalist” in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article), with patient safety (where he and our co-founder Dr. Kedar Mate met), and as medicine transitioned from paper to digital records with the widespread implementation of electronic health records. He does that again now with AI in his new book, A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future. The book is the most clear-eyed, grounded account of our current moment, ripe with both breathtaking opportunity and considerable challenges. Bob brings a refreshing blend of pragmatism and optimism for what AI can achieve in healthcare. In his Pattern Recognition Substack, he argues that the AI tools being adopted today (scribes, chart review, prior auth assistance) are genuinely helpful, but they're not the destination. The real transformation happens when AI moves from reducing administrative friction to improving clinical decisions, and that requires platforms, not point solutions, exactly what we are building at Qualified Health. Scribes went from being a breakthrough to a commodity in about two years. The next battle is integration: AI that knows the patient, lives inside the workflow, and actually changes what happens at the point of care. What Bob is anticipating is exactly what Qualified Health is building to deliver better outcomes to our patients and families. Health systems need an AI platform that learns continuously from clinical and operational signals across the enterprise, not a collection of disconnected tools or modules locked in an EHR. Bob's perspective, grounded in both frontline medical practice and leadership and deep engagement with the technology, will sharpen our thinking as we push this work forward. We're grateful to have him in our corner. More to come.
Tyler Smith
3d
Huge!
That is wonderful. Many years ago we were on the same Board. Great man!
Awesome!