Brian Lawenda, Radiation Oncologist at Advocate Radiation Oncology, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“The End of Medical Guesswork: How Artificial Superintelligence Will Liberate Cancer Care
By Brian D. Lawenda, M.D.
The Last Barrier Between Doctors and Patients:
As a radiation oncologist, I love my job. The privilege of guiding patients through a cancer diagnosis (the strategic planning, the technical precision, and the profound human connection) is intensely rewarding.
Yet, the greatest challenge isn’t the science; it’s the friction that separates us from those we treat. Highly trained clinicians spend countless hours acting as data clerks: clicking boxes, abstracting charts, negotiating prior authorizations, and battling documentation systems never designed for care. This mandatory chaos is what fuels physician burnout.
Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) won’t replace oncologists. It will liberate us, acting as the ultimate augmenter. As Eric Topol, the cardiologist, geneticist, and author of Deep Medicine, argues:
“The greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust—the human touch—between patients and doctors.”
ASI will quietly dismantle this administrative barrier through invisible efficiency, returning time, attention, and empathy (the core elements of human care) to the center of medicine.
The Trillion-Dollar Administrative Barrier:
The friction clinicians feel is the personal experience of a massive structural problem that consumes the entire healthcare system. This barrier is not just frustrating; it is the single largest financial inefficiency in U.S. medicine.
The data reveals the catastrophic system-wide cost of this inefficiency. While the available, audited data focuses primarily on hospital expenditures, it confirms a systemic trend:
- From 2011 to 2023, administrative costs grew by a staggering 87.2%, outpacing the growth in direct patient care spending (75.4%).
- By 2023, U.S. hospitals alone spent an estimated $687 Billion on administrative activities, a figure that is nearly double the $346 Billion allocated to direct patient care.
This rapidly escalating $687 billion overhead is the real-world cost of the mandatory chaos that Artificial Superintelligence is engineered to eliminate. By autonomously automating the vast, complex, and manual compliance, documentation, and billing processes, ASI will become the most significant cost-saving measure in modern medical history. This makes its adoption not just a clinical aspiration but an economic imperative to restore financial viability and efficiency to the entire healthcare system.
From Data to Discovery — and Beyond:
The first proof of this radical transformation has already materialized. …continued here.”
More from Brian Lawenda on OncoDaily.