A Giant Leap
How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Evenhanded and insightful.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“An accessible, often fascinating primer.... Essential, illuminating reading.” —Kirkus
From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Digital Doctor comes an engaging, clear-eyed, and ultimately hopeful examination of healthcare’s efforts to embrace generative artificial intelligence.
In A Giant Leap, physician and thought leader Robert Wachter navigates between hype and skepticism to make a compelling case for AI’s power to transform healthcare. He argues that, in a system buckling under the weight of bureaucratic pressures, soaring costs, and clinician burnout, AI doesn’t need to be perfect—it only needs to be better.
Drawing on extensive research and more than 100 interviews with pioneers across medicine, technology, policy, and business, Wachter shows how AI is already entering hospitals and clinics to draft notes, field patient questions, recommend treatments, interpret images, and guide surgeries. He unflinchingly confronts risks like hallucinations, biases, and misinformation, while revealing how AI can now match, and sometimes surpass, physicians in areas ranging from diagnosis to empathy.
But this isn’t simply a technology story. It’s about the human choices that will determine whether AI becomes healthcare’s salvation or another source of harm and frustration.
Blending clinical insight, vivid storytelling, and journalistic precision, A Giant Leap offers an indispensable roadmap for healthcare leaders, clinicians, and patients. It is a vibrant and timely account of how AI is changing what it means to care—and be cared for—in this age of astonishing technology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wachter (The Digital Doctor), chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, offers an evenhanded and insightful exploration of the ways artificial intelligence could impact the medical profession. Recognizing that "nearly one million Americans are severely harmed or killed by medical mistakes every year" and that the current healthcare system is wildly expensive and often inaccessible, Wachter argues that "AI doesn't have to be perfect to be better." He examines possible physician uses of AI, explaining how its ability to analyze vast datasets could enable more personalized patient care, and explores how patients might benefit, noting, for example, that AI scribes can document patient-doctor conversations, thus freeing up the physician for more present and genuine connections. Wachter doesn't see AI replacing doctors anytime soon because its biggest shortcoming is "a lack of expansive thinking and real-world experience," but he does believe that it can automate administrative tasks, decreasing the amount of time spent on paperwork and the frustrations associated with filing pre-authorization forms with insurance companies. Throughout, Wachter clearly and concisely explains the complex technology and its possible medical uses and makes a convincing case that AI will usher in "something of a golden age in healthcare." The result is a clear-eyed road map of AI's potential in medicine.
