Artificial Intelligence and the Physician of Tomorrow | Michael Howell, MD, MPH

The Doctor's Art

Henry Bair and Tyler Johnson

Medicine, Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Philosophy

5 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens to the practice of medicine when machines begin to reason, summarize and even empathize — at least in the linguistic sense — better than humans do? In this episode, we meet with Michael Howell, MD, MPH, Chief Clinical Officer at Google, to explore the seismic shifts underway in healthcare as artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in clinical workflows. Dr. Howell, a pulmonary and critical care physician, has spent his career at the crossroads of clinical exc...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Henry Bear.
0:03.0	And I'm Tyler Johnson.
0:04.6	And you're listening to The Doctors Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine.
0:09.6	Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered, what makes medicine meaningful?
0:14.9	Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors?
0:18.6	How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor-patient
0:21.7	connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of
0:26.8	suffering? In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across health care,
0:32.9	from doctors and nurses to patients and health care executives, those who have collected a career's worth
0:38.3	of hard-earned wisdom. Probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear
0:43.3	stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening.
0:49.0	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.
1:02.0	What happens to the practice of medicine when machines begin to reason,
1:08.0	summarize, and even empathize, at least in the linguistic sense, better than humans do.
1:14.6	In this episode, we meet with Dr. Michael Howell, chief clinical officer at Google,
1:19.6	to explore the seismic shifts underway in healthcare as artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in clinical workflows. Dr. Howell, a pulmonary and critical care physician, has spent his career at the
1:33.3	crossroads of clinical excellence and systems innovation. Before joining Google, he served as
1:38.3	chief quality officer at University of Chicago Medicine. At Google, he leads the development and implementation of
1:45.5	AI technologies intended to support scalable, safe, and equitable medical care. Over the course
1:53.2	of our conversation, we examine what AI actually is and isn't. We delve in to how large
1:59.8	language models are reshaping the cognitive labor of clinicians,
2:03.5	the implications of machines that may one day outperform humans in diagnosis,
	...

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