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This article was written by Chris Boyer, who is a digital strategist and consultant who helps health systems, health services organizations and digital health companies improve the patient experience. Through his consultancy, Chris Boyer LLC, he advises leaders on digital transformation, marketing technology and enterprise governance. He is a nationally recognized speaker and author, and co-host of the "Touch Point" podcast, a weekly show on digital experience, transformation and innovation in healthcare that has run for nine years and 500 episodes. 

AI is genuinely good at helping us think. Frankly, given everything on our plate, most of us could use the help. That is the real promise for healthcare. It holds more than we can and finds patterns we would miss. Not to mention it helps us move faster.

But there is a part that gets said less often at conferences or in thought-leadership posts on LinkedIn. Despite the doomsday cries, the real risk is not that AI takes your judgment away from you. It is that, in our current healthcare environment, handing your judgment over can feel like making progress. Picture a cliff with a genuinely beautiful view. You do not fall off it by accident. You walk toward it, on purpose, because the closer you get the better the view looks. The promise of what AI could do is that view. It pulls you forward. And the drop is that somewhere along the way, without it ever feeling like a mistake, you have handed over the judgment that was the whole point.

I learned this in a way I did not expect by building something small.

Reed Smith and I just marked the 500th episode of the Touch Point podcast. To mark it, we built an eBook that pulls the show into one argument. We used AI to help.

Nine years of a weekly show is close to 500 episodes. Neither of us could remember everything we said, and we are the ones who recorded it. But AI could. In fact, we built an archive of every episode, fed it the transcripts, and asked it to find the threads that ran across years of conversation, not a chronological retelling. That is acceleration. It did in days what would have taken us months, and the book exists because of it.

Then we hit the edge. The moment the tool started to try and decide what any of it meant, which arguments were true, where we had been wrong, what was actually worth saying, the writing got smoother and less honest at the same time. It read beautifully but it was wrong. The smoothness was the problem though, because it made the wrongness easy to overlook and accept.

That is the cliff, up close. Not a dramatic failure. A better-looking draft that quietly stops being true.

But we knew that, so we did the slow part by hand. Every argument checked against the tape. Every guest quote checked word for word. Every episode number verified. We kept the machine on the work of scale and kept ourselves on the work of meaning. The book got better every time we held that line and worse every time it blurred.

This is not a story about our book. I think it is the shape of the next few years in healthcare with AI. And we are already standing on the edge of this cliff.

Look back at the last decade. Social, mobile, portals, telehealth, CRM. Each arrived positioned as the thing that would finally close the distance between patients and their care. Our book traces what happened, quoting 26 people who were at the front lines building it. The tools changed. The distance barely moved. The reason was almost never that we did not know what to do. The signals were visible early, over and over. What ran short was the will, or maybe the ability, to change the system underneath. Buying a new tool is easier, and it lets everyone feel like the hard part is handled.

AI raises the stakes on that pattern because it is the most capable tool we have ever been handed. And it's the most convincing. It can accelerate our real work. It can generate a fluent, confident version of your judgment and hand it back polished. It can seemingly take that task off your plate right at the moment you should have kept it. The organizations that do well with AI will be the ones that stay clear about which is which. Let AI help accelerate our thinking. But by all means, keep the judgment. The gap between those two is not obvious at this moment and sometimes getting it wrong will not feel like a mistake. It will feel like progress.

The eBook we created is called Healthcare's Long Walk Toward the Patient. Ten chapters, 26 guests and one question underneath all of it. Does what we're doing actually serve the patient? We grade our own past thinking in a poor light in a few places, because we were wrong. But we left it in, because the recordings would have caught us if we tried to look smarter than we were.

I will be at HCIC this fall, recording and talking with people who work on exactly this. I do this every year. If you are there, find me. I want to know whether you think we are holding the line or walking off the edge, because I go back and forth. Frankly, I would rather think it through with all of us. That’s what makes our community so strong.

Our book ends where the show always ends. We are not done walking. The walking is the point. It is slower than the view from the cliff, and it is the only way that actually gets there.