Hi, I'm Henry Bear. And I'm Tyler Johnson. And you're listening to The Doctors Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine. Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered, what makes medicine meaningful? Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor-patient

connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of

suffering? In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across health care,

from doctors and nurses to patients and health care executives, those who have collected a career's worth

of hard-earned wisdom. Probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear

stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening.

We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think out loud about what illness and

healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.

The electronic medical record has become an unwelcome interloper in many physician-patient

interactions. Too often, patients are answering questions lobbed from behind

a monitor by physicians hurriedly typing in the EMR. This kind of impersonal care isn't what patients or

physicians want, but it's what the system often demands. There is hope for improvement. Across the country,

AI scribes are being rolled out in EMRs now.

AI can listen to the visit, generate a clinical note, and leave the physician to review and edit the note later,

freeing the physician to interact with their patient face-to-face.

These AI scribes are an early stage of a much larger experiment, an experiment that is not simply asking whether AI can redeem the EMR, but whether AI can usher in something closer to a golden age of medicine.

Our guest on this episode is Dr. Bob Wachter, professor and chair of medicine at UCSF, and a leading voice in

hospital medicine and administration. In 1996, he and his colleague Lee Goldman coined the term

hospitalist, which is now the fastest-growing specialty in the history of modern medicine.

He has authored over 300 articles and six books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Digital Doctor, and his 2026 book, A Giant Leap,

how AI is transforming healthcare and what that means for our future.

Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Wachter shares how his long-held passion for studying systems led him to studying the digital transformation of medicine for the past 15 years,

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