Medical records just became the hottest commodity in Silicon Valley. In a stunning 72-hour span this January, OpenAI and Anthropic launched competing platforms that transform fragmented health data into AI-powered personal health advisors, signaling a digital colonization of America’s healthcare system. While regulators spent a decade mandating interoperability through the 21st Century Cures Act, tech giants are exploiting the resulting data floodgates, deploying sophisticated language models to ingest, analyze, and monetize patient information at unprecedented scale.
Have we traded medical privacy for the convenience of conversational health intelligence?
The biggest barrier to deploying artificial intelligence tools in the UK’s NHS stems from problems integrating them with electronic patient record (EPR/EHR) systems, according to a new report by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). The survey of 541 RCP members shows that a lack of interoperability between EPR systems is the key factor preventing clinicians from using AI effectively in everyday practice.