Why Smarter Healthcare Technology Still Needs More Empathy
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Transcript intelligence
What OpenRounds heard
Source-grounded signals extracted from the episode transcript. Timestamps and supporting excerpts appear when available.
The speaker reports that electronic health records generate excessive, unusable information due to trainee copy-pasting and overly specific coding, such as a real code for being sucked into a jet engine, making the system sterile and overwhelming.
The speaker reports that physicians must assimilate scan and blood test data to make surgical decisions due to persistent uncertainty, affirming a persistent human-in-the-loop boundary in AI-assisted surgery workflows.
The speaker reports using AI to quickly gather contact information for ALS organizations across the United States, reducing a weeks-long task to fifteen minutes.
“we have a product that i was working on that helps als patients and so i wanted to reach out and find out all the different als organizations in the united states each one has an organization and so i work with ai to basically just say hey go find all that information for me give me names phone numbers and things like that which would take me weeks to do and it doesn't a matter of fifteen minutes and it brings all this data back to me”
In this episode of Business of AI in Healthcare, Bob Kaiser speaks with Dr. Alan R. Cohen, Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of Comfort Always: Healing in the Age of Technology.Drawing from 40 years of experience caring for children with brain tumors and complex neurological conditions, Dr. Cohen explores the balance between advanced medical technology, artificial intelligence, surgical judgment, and human compassion. He shares why technology can treat disease, but humanity is what heals the patient.The conversation covers the rise of AI in healthcare, the promise and risks of relying on artificial intelligence in clinical decision-making, the impact of electronic health records on the doctor-patient relationship, and why empathy, trust, touch, humor, and listening remain essential in modern medicine.Dr. Cohen also shares powerful patient stories from his career, including lessons on hope, honesty, pediatric care, and the importance of never ignoring a mother’s intuition. For healthcare leaders, clinicians, AI innovators, and anyone building technology for patient care, this episode is a reminder that the future of healthcare should not be less human. It should be more human.