Douglas Flora, Executive Medical Director of Yung Family Cancer Center at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, President-Elect of the Association of Cancer Care Centers, and Editor in Chief of AI in Precision Oncology, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Automating the Mundane to Rescue the Humane
The nineteenth-century critics of the thermometer were wrong about the instrument. But they were prophetic about the distance.
We cannot allow that history to rhyme.
If we use AI merely to squeeze more patients into a fractured day—treating the clinic like an assembly line optimized for throughput—we will have gained the supercomputer and lost the physician.
The true threat isn’t the deskilling of our minds. It’s the atrophy of our empathy.
The smarter cancer care I advocate for does not seek to replace the doctor. It seeks to replace the mundane with the humane. To excise the ‘administrative violence’ of modern healthcare—the hours lost to inbox management, prior authorizations, documentation designed for billing rather than healing.
Imagine a consultation where the keyboard is silent. The AI listens. Organizes. And you are simply there. Making eye contact. Measuring the silence. Fully present for the first time in a decade.
This is not deskilling. This is the art we swore an oath to uphold.
AI will not make us stupid. If we lead with intention, it will force us to be wise. We must stop framing this technology as a competitor to the physician’s intellect and start framing it as a prosthesis for the physician’s soul.
The future belongs to those who partner with machines to master the complexity of biology—so they can devote their full attention to the complexity of the life sitting in front of them.
That is not a loss of skill. That is medicine.”
More posts featuring Douglas Flora.