( Chat GPT 5 )
Title:
“Digital Health, My A—!” —
A Lewis Black Rant on the AMA’s New Center for Digital Health and AI
I just read that the American Medical Association—you know, the people who still fax things—has launched a Center for Digital Health and AI. And I swear to God, I nearly swallowed my tongue. Because nothing says “cutting-edge innovation” like a 178-year-old bureaucracy with a website that looks like it was coded on Netscape Navigator.
They’re calling it the Center for Digital Health and AI, which is adorable. Because when I think of digital health, I think of long clinical trials, machine learning models, multimodal agentic architectures integrating probabilistic reasoning across federated datasets—NOT some committee at AMA headquarters that can't figure out how to reboot a printer.
And they say the goal is to “put physicians at the center of shaping and implementing AI technologies.” Really? Because physicians are already at the center—of 300 unread MyChart messages and a prior-authorization labyrinth designed by Satan’s intern. The AMA says they’ll “embed physicians across the lifecycle of digital tools.” Well, that’s great. Maybe they can embed a few coders across the lifecycle of Epic, so it doesn’t take six clicks to order a damn Tylenol.
Then there’s John Whyte, the new CEO, who says AMA will spend millions—MILLIONS!—on this new center. Which sounds impressive, until you realize that’s roughly the cost of one mid-tier AI conference booth in Las Vegas. But don’t worry, they’re “searching for a senior vice president” to lead it. Translation: They don’t know what the hell this thing is yet, but by God, there’ll be someone in charge of it.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, people like Nalan Karunanayake are writing 30-page papers about “agentic AI” systems that autonomously make medical decisions using multimodal large language models integrated with probabilistic reasoning frameworks. But the AMA’s version of innovation is a webinar called “So You Think You Can Prompt.”
And the JAMA Summit on AI—oh, that was rich. Dozens of experts convening to say, “We need to evaluate and regulate AI tools.” Thank you, Captain Obvious! I’m sure the FDA will get right on that—just as soon as they finish approving the backlog of 1,200 “AI-enabled” medical devices, half of which are basically spreadsheets with delusions of grandeur.
But wait—Nature Medicine chimes in too: “Generative AI can improve healthcare efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance patient care.” Sure! And maybe unicorns will do your insurance coding. The experts are training multimodal transformer models to synthesize data across radiology, genomics, and clinical text—but the AMA thinks its “AI governance playbooks” are going to make that safer? It’s like watching a toddler lecture Elon Musk about rocket design.
Every paragraph of these press releases reads like someone fed ChatGPT a thesaurus and told it to “sound visionary.” “Physician-in-the-loop deployment.” “Cross-sector collaboration.” “Practice transformation.” You know what that means? Committees. PowerPoints! Endless “stakeholder alignment” calls where everyone says, “Great perspective!” and no one changes a damn thing.
And I love the phrase “augmented intelligence.” That’s the AMA’s preferred term because “artificial intelligence” apparently sounds too scary. It’s linguistic Botox—an attempt to smooth out the wrinkles of reality. Because nothing says “we’ve got this under control” like slapping a friendlier label on the thing that’s about to rewrite medicine, while you still can't remember your EHR password.
Meanwhile, every doctor I know is drowning in EMR alerts and pop-ups that scream “DO YOU REALLY WANT TO PRESCRIBE THIS?” Give them an AI system that predicts sepsis three hours before onset, and they’d still have to click through four warning boxes and re-enter their password.
So sure, AMA—build your shiny new Center. Announce another initiative. Maybe it’ll even have a cool logo. But if you really want to lead digital health, start by figuring out how to make one doctor note auto-populate correctly. Until then, your “augmented intelligence” is just paperwork with better P.R.
And that’s the state of digital medicine, ladies and gentlemen: a $4 trillion healthcare system in which the only true AI is still “Astonishing Inefficiency.”
