A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future

"Evenhanded and insightful." --Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"An accessible, often fascinating primer.... Essential, illuminating reading." --Kirkus

From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Digital Doctor comes an engaging, clear-eyed, and ultimately hopeful examination of healthcare's efforts to embrace generative artificial intelligence.

In A Giant Leap, physician and thought leader Robert Wachter navigates between hype and skepticism to make a compelling case for AI's power to transform healthcare. He argues that, in a system buckling under the weight of bureaucratic pressures, soaring costs, and clinician burnout, AI doesn't need to be perfect--it only needs to be better.

Drawing on extensive research and more than 100 interviews with pioneers across medicine, technology, policy, and business, Wachter shows how AI is already entering hospitals and clinics to draft notes, field patient questions, recommend treatments, interpret images, and guide surgeries. He unflinchingly confronts risks like hallucinations, biases, and misinformation, while revealing how AI can now match, and sometimes surpass, physicians in areas ranging from diagnosis to empathy.

But this isn't simply a technology story. It's about the human choices that will determine whether AI becomes healthcare's salvation or another source of harm and frustration.

Blending clinical insight, vivid storytelling, and journalistic precision, A Giant Leap offers an indispensable roadmap for healthcare leaders, clinicians, and patients. It is a vibrant and timely account of how AI is changing what it means to care--and be cared for--in this age of astonishing technology.

Author: Robert Wachter
Publisher: Portfolio
Published: 02/03/2026
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 9.13h x 6.35w x 1.05d
ISBN: 9798217044245


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/15/2025
Booklist 12/01/2025
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2026

About the Author
Robert Wachter is chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he is also the Holly Smith Distinguished Professor in Science and Medicine and holds the Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine. He has appeared more than a dozen times on Modern Healthcare magazine's list of the fifty most influential physician-executives in the US and was number one on the list in 2015. An elected mem­ber of the prestigious National Academy of Medicine, he coined the term "hospitalist" and is considered the father of the hospitalist field, the fastest-growing specialty in modern medicine. He is the author of five books, including The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age. He is married to author and journalist Katie Hafner; they live in San Francisco with their miniature poodle, Newman.