Be Curious, Not Judgmental
Ruminations and musings about healthcare AI, technology, and strategy
Author: Myoung Cha
-
AI Can’t “Cure All Diseases” Until It Beats Phase 2
·
One of the big dreams of AI researchers is that it will soon solve drug discovery (as I explored in AI drug discovery and engineering serendipity) and unleash a boom in new life-saving therapies. Alphabet committed $600 million in new capital to Isomorphic Labs on that rhetoric, promising to “cure all diseases” as its first AI‑designed molecules head to humans next year. And the first wave of AI molecules is moving… Read more
-
Yippee-Ki-Yay, Paper Clipboard
Checking in for a doctor’s appointment still feels like time‑travel to the 1990s for most patients. You step up to the reception desk, are handed a clipboard stacked with half a dozen forms, then pass over your driver’s license and an insurance card so someone can photocopy them. You balance the board on your knee in an uncomfortable chair, rewriting your address, employer, and allergies—information that already lives somewhere on… Read more
-
Health Privacy in the AI Era
·
Sam Altman hardly ever breaks stride when he talks about ChatGPT, yet in a recent podcast he paused to deliver a blunt warning, which caused my ears to perk up. A therapist might promise that what you confess stays in the room, Sam said, but an AI chatbot cannot, at least not based on the current legal framework. With ~20% of Americans asking an AI chatbot about health monthly (and… Read more
-
Level‑5 Healthcare: Why Prescribing Will Decide When AI Becomes a Real Doctor
·
Every week seems to bring another paper or podcast trumpeting the rise of diagnostic AI. Google DeepMind’s latest pre‑print on its Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) is a good example: the model aced a blinded OSCE against human clinicians, but its researchers still set restrictive guardrails, forbidding any individualized medical advice and routing every draft plan to an overseeing physician for sign‑off. In other words, even one of the most advanced AI clinical systems… Read more
-
Apple Watch: From Activity Rings to an AI-Powered Check-Engine Light
·
I had a front-row seat to the evolution of the Apple Watch as a health device. In the early days, it was clear that activity tracking was the killer use case and the Apple Watch hit its stride with millions of users closing their three Activity Rings every day. Over time, Apple added more sensors and algorithms with the FDA clearances of the irregular rhythm notification and the ECG app… Read more
-
Don’t Believe the Hype — Medical Superintelligence Isn’t Here Yet
·
The AGI hype is in full effect with new frontier model achievements every month and an arms-race for AI talent heating up. Last week, Elon claimed Grok 4 was “better than PhD level at everything,” with a record score on Humanity’s Last Exam and best ever on ARC-AGI-2. Google had its own announcement with MedGemma-27 B (multimodal) hitting 87.7 percent on MedQA; Microsoft had already pitched its Medical AI Diagnostic Orchestrator… Read more
-
What I’ve Learned About LLMs in Healthcare (so far)
·
It has been a breathless time in technology since the GPT-3 moment, and I’m not sure I have experienced greater discordance between the hype and reality than right now, at least as it relates to healthcare. To be sure, I have caught myself agape in awe at what LLMs seem capable of, but in the last year, it has become ever more clear to me what the limitations are today… Read more
-
DOGE & #MakeAmericaHealthyAgain
Some personal opinions on what DOGE and #MakeAmericaHealthyAgain could do to reshape U.S. healthcare. The HHS budget is ~$1.8 trillion, ~23% of the federal budget as proposed for FY25; CMS makes up the lion’s share of the budget (>80%). Hard to imagine reducing the deficit without major changes in how healthcare is funded and delivered. In this table from the Dec 2022 OMB analysis of options to reduce the deficit,… Read more
-
Affirmative Action and Asian Americans
The recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action strikes home in a deeply personal way. As a second-generation Korean American who attended Harvard College in the late 1990s, I always considered myself very lucky. Our family had no connections to Harvard, or any other college for that matter, and I was not a recruited athlete. Asian Americans were 16% of the admitted class when I went to school and had… Read more
-
Fad or trend?
·
Many of you are probably not old enough to remember, but there was a brief time when pet rocks were a craze and sold out in stores across the country. There have been many fads throughout history, from tulip mania to Garbage Pail Kids. When you are in the middle of a fad, it can be hard to tell that this thing that everyone is crazy about is here to… Read more