AI could save lives by easing treatment delivery

This is a guest essay for Healthbeat. Public health, explained: Sign up to receive Healthbeat’s free national newsletter here.According to tech leaders, artificial intelligence will be transformative for our health. AI could give us “the next 50-100 years of biological progress in 5-10 years,” declared Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. “Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer,” enthused Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Back in the clinic, our enthusiasm is more guarded. Part of it is the checkered history of health technology, too often extracting humanism in medicine for the pursuit of profits. Another hesitation is because so often, in the real world, the problem is not discovery but delivery. Cures that don’t reach the patients most in need; prevention that never makes it into practice. But what if AI could actually help us change that?Take one of my longtime patients, whom I recently saw on his 45th birthday. We commiserated about the travails of middle age