Microsoft Research Podcast Coauthor roundtable: Reflecting on healthcare economics, biomedical research, and medical education
Aug 21, 2025
In a thought-provoking discussion, Zak Kohane, a physician and Harvard Medical School professor, teams up with journalist Carey Goldberg, co-author of 'The AI Revolution in Medicine.' They delve into the complexities of integrating AI in healthcare, emphasizing the balance between innovation and traditional practices. The duo reflects on ethical implications, the quest for personalized medicine, and the necessity for trust in patient-doctor relationships. They also explore challenges related to healthcare costs, workforce dynamics, and the future of biomedical research.
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A Collective Choice About AI's Role
- Society must choose how to shape AI: constrain it, submit to it, or partner with it.
- Peter Lee urges designing AI so humans plus AI achieve outcomes neither can alone.
Individual Gains Don't Guarantee System Gains
- Individual clinicians adopt AI and gain personal productivity and quality improvements.
- Systems often fail to capture those gains because healthcare requires coordinated process-wide changes.
Scaling Individual Productivity Requires Reorg
- Software teams show 20–30% individual productivity boosts that don't scale to whole teams without reorganizing.
- Peter Lee suggests reshaping teams (smaller, full-stack) to capture aggregated AI productivity.
