How Stanford Health Care Is Rethinking What AI Should Actually Do for Clinicians with CIO Dr. Michael Pfeffer
About this episode
Dr. Michael Pfeffer discusses how Stanford Healthcare is innovating AI tools for clinicians and the importance of redesigning healthcare encounters.
Dr. Michael Pfeffer is Stanford Healthcare's Chief Information Officer and a practicing hospitalist, which means he builds AI tools in the morning and uses them on patients that afternoon. That combination is rarer than it should be, and it shapes everything about how he thinks. Stanford is one of the most AI-forward health systems in the country. It runs 1,500 software applications, has put generative AI into the hands of its clinicians through ambient documentation and a plain-language chart querying tool called ChatEHR, and has published the outcomes of all of it, including the parts that did not go as expected. Mike's argument is that none of that is the point. Healthcare spends three times more on AI than any other industry, and most of that investment is going toward automating processes that were broken to begin with. Digitizing the way medicine has always been done is not transformation. The real opportunity is redesigning what the encounter itself looks like, offloading guideline-driven busywork to agents that can own it, and building toward a world where the right test is ordered the first time and the right drug is prescribed before the patient leaves the room. In this…
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