Last week, OpenAI announced a new Epic integration that brings authorized patient data together with public sources covering clinical trials, CMS data and biomedical research from NIH, with the goal of giving clinicians more time with their patients. At first glance, this is another healthcare AI announcement, just from a company building the most advanced AI models. But buried underneath the technical capabilities is something more interesting. After decades of technology causing fragmentation in healthcare, we’re starting to use tools to put it back together.

There really isn’t anything more personal than choosing to place your health in someone else’s hands, or the health of someone you love. That relationship between a patient and clinician is built on trust, understanding and mutual engagement. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be.

But even before artificial intelligence, we lost a lot of that human connection. The inexorable adoption of healthcare technology over the past two decades has been remarkably efficient at creating more information, more workflow, more process and, yes, more bills.

Clinicians bounce between the patient records for the day’s visits and inboxes filled with questions and follow-up messages. On top of that, they have enormous documentation requirements and convoluted workflows to dig through. The specialists they refer to may or may not be in the same health system. They may not even be affiliated with the hospital where the patient received care. They’re out in the community.

Patients are moving across all of these systems too, serving as the courier carrying information from one appointment to the next.

My own experience has equipped me for that courier role, health tech branded messenger bag and all. I’m a boy who grew up on commercial fishing boats and around docks. I didn’t go to medical school, and yet somehow I ended up surrounded by medicine.

I’m fortunate that my wife is a primary care nurse practitioner and researcher. My father-in-law has practiced internal medicine for decades. Many of our closest friends are physicians, nurses and healthcare executives who understand the complexities of these systems.

Around our dinner table, conversations bounce from our children’s new teachers to a recent clinical guideline or U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation without warning. I also have a habit of inflicting a fair number of injuries on myself, so my own medical adventures are an all too frequent topic as well.

I’ve personally bounced across four different health systems in the past six months, mostly for routine and follow-up care. We pre-game the questions before every appointment. Afterward, I have someone qualified to help me put it all together. If something just doesn’t make sense, I have people I trust who can help me understand it.

Most people leave an appointment trying to remember everything that happened, with an after-visit summary in hand, and jump right back into their lives. Work, children, aging parents and sometimes even the question of how to live their new normal are at the forefront of their minds.

The question they meant to ask during their visit comes to them later.

Then come the calls to schedule a referral. The robocalls telling them their prescription is ready. The incredibly confusing explanation of benefits. Maybe a bill. Maybe another appointment.

And through all of it, there often isn’t anyone helping them connect the larger story.

Recently, I interviewed three chief medical officers from diverse backgrounds working on very different parts of healthcare. Radiology leadership, time-sensitive care coordination and making sense of longitudinal medical records. All three described different versions of the same underlying problem.

Healthcare doesn’t lack information; it lacks connection.

Rebuilding The Reading Room

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. David Dascal, then the chief medical officer of one of the largest teleradiology practices in the United States. The collaboration was less focused on an algorithm and more on how we could use the technology to restore what the practice of radiology used to look like. Specifically, how we could improve communication between emergency physicians and radiologists as though they were still working on the same floor.

“Years ago, the cardiothoracic surgeon would walk into the reading room and sit beside the radiologist,” Dascal told me. “We’d review the CT images together and trace the dissection flap through the aorta. Was it extending into the coronary arteries? Into the carotids? Were the renal arteries involved? Every one of those details determined the surgical approach. Those conversations happened naturally because we were physically working in the same space.”

The images coming off the scanner aren’t really the product. It’s the interpretation of the radiologist, the consultation with the physician caring for the patient and the context that set the path forward.

But technology has changed medicine. Radiologists are farther away from the treating physician. Sometimes they’re in centralized locations inside the hospital, but more and more frequently they’re miles away. Meanwhile, the emergency physician remains at the bedside. The patient remains in the bed.

“The communication channel between the radiologist and the emergency physician had essentially been severed,” Dascal said. “Instead of walking twenty feet into the reading room, we were relying on phones, call centers and intermediaries. Every additional step created another opportunity for delay.”

The collaboration created what Dascal described as a virtual reading room, a room where emergency physicians and radiologists could communicate directly, review the same images and work from the same understanding. Whether the imaging was completed, awaiting radiologist interpretation or had a final read was now visible as a badge or notification, not a phone call for the emergency physician. When they did need to make a call, it was to discuss the patient, not the process.

The technology took care of the process. The human connection was about the patient. It moved the patient forward without all of the technological distance that had accumulated over the years.

Bringing Expertise To The Patient

Dr. Andrew Ibrahim, chief meedical officer of Viz AI, is a surgeon. He is also a son who helped his father receive care for his stroke.

“I didn’t appreciate how hard it is for information to get to the right person,” he told me. “There’s a person at the end of that telephone game who has to make a time-sensitive decision.”

It’s natural when a medical crisis occurs to assume the best next step is to transfer to the largest academic medical center in the region. However, technology can move expertise locally, giving regional hospitals critical support in caring for a very ill patient exactly where they are. When physicians at transfer centers can access all the relevant information, including imaging, they can make a better decision about whether a transfer will actually change the course of care .

That can spare a family from getting in the car and driving hours to another city while a loved one undergoes surgery or other treatment that could have been provided locally. It can mean avoiding hotel rooms and separation at exactly the wrong time.

Technology allows expertise to travel to the patient instead of forcing the patient to travel to the expertise. Families stay closer to home. Patients stay closer to the people who support them. Rural hospitals continue caring for members of their communities, and higher-level medical centers preserve limited capacity for the patients who truly need highly specialized care.

Connecting Information Across Time

Many serious illnesses appear sudden simply because no one has previously assembled the story leading up to them. There are breadcrumbs. A lab trend spanning years. Moving your bedroom downstairs because you can’t manage the stairs anymore. Information scattered across thousands of pages, sometimes living in different systems, that nobody has the time to reconstruct.

Dr. David Kirk, chief medical officer of Regard, explained that individually, each of those observations might seem insignificant. But when viewed together, they can tell a much larger story.

“The body is changing slowly,” Kirk told me. “We just don’t have the time to find those tiny hints.”

Primary care physicians often manage between 1,200 and 1,900 patients . Expecting anyone to consolidate years of scattered information during a 15-minute office visit is impossible. Human attention has limits . And time is one of the most precious ones.

This is where the promise of these new systems comes into play. They might do something the human just doesn’t have time to do: pull together scattered information, surface the trends and give the clinician a more complete picture to interrogate instead of an avalanche of information to dig through.

Healthcare technology occupies a unique space because of the stakes. Behind every lab draw, every image and every conversation are humans. Those who have dedicated their lives to caring for others, and those who need that care.

The incredible advances in technology over this decade offer us a chance to restore some of that connection, and potentially even deepen it. Not just because technology might make the experience more efficient, but because it might restore something much more intangible: the feeling that somebody cares.