David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Epic is the choke point of the industry at this point to decide what software innovations reach hospitals. I don’t think it’s overstating it to say if you’re developing new breakthrough software to be used by physicians in hospital systems, Epic’s the one that gets to decide, are you going to reach that customer or not. Exactly. I think the basic bull case on ambient voice, ambient AI, is this is a great new product revenue opportunity. The mega bull case to borrow from our IPL episode here is one CIO was talking to me, he’s like, look, I don’t have high confidence that this is going to happen, but as ambient AI becomes better and better, is there a version of the future where the EHR “itself” just fades into the background and this all just becomes an AI operating system? What is it primarily doing to EHR? It’s capturing data about what happened, it’s recording it both for clinical uses and then importantly for billing purposes. Then what needs to happen with that for billing purposes? Well, that data needs to get shipped over to the payer, whether that’s the government or an insurance company, and then needs to get judged and adjudicated, and then payouts need to happen. Is there any real reason why this can’t all be done by AI in the future? Why do we actually really need user-facing software here? Or a lot of it. So yeah, there may be some future where, and this is a utopian type future, but a lot of the administrative bloat and costs in the system actually gets taken care of by ambient AI just sucking it all up here. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it sounds nice.…

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