AI Won’t Save Healthcare’s Soul
AI Won’t Save Healthcare’s Soul. Physicians Like This One Might.
About four years ago, we recruited two brothers to Norman Regional Health System: Dr. Krishna Vedala and Dr. Raghuveer Vedala. Young physicians, deeply committed to their patients and their profession, never afraid to pursue excellence and innovation — and exactly the kind of people who fit the culture of healing we work to build at NRHS.
This week, Krishna Vedala MD MPH MBA DABOM CSPPM CSPR CSBI LSSGB CPE FACHDM FACP posted something I cannot stop thinking about. He shared his new membership in the American College of Artificial Intelligence and Medicine, and wrote that AI must “support the human connection at the heart of medicine.”
It’s a simple line. But it touches one of the central nerves of The Healer Revolution — and it matters that he’s the one saying it.
Krishna isn’t an AI vendor or a futurist selling a platform. He’s a practicing physician choosing to help guide how AI enters medicine rather than wait to have it done to him. That instinct, clinicians stepping in to shape the technology instead of being shaped by it, is exactly what this moment requires.
And it opens onto the larger question my book asks: not just how we use AI, but what we’re protecting when we do.
Because the “human connection at the heart of medicine” is bigger than the exam room. It’s the registration clerk who lowers a frightened patient’s blood pressure before the physician ever walks in. It’s the environmental services worker whose diligence prevents the infection that never makes the chart. It’s the security officer who turns a chaotic ER into a place that feels safe.
In The Healer Revolution, I argue that all of them are healers — not because of their title or training, but because they answered a call to make broken things whole. The crisis we’re living through isn’t only about technology or burnout; it’s about a system that has lost sight of that truth. AI’s highest purpose, then, isn’t to replace any of these people. It’s to clear away the documentation, the prior auths, and the administrative weight so that every one of them gets back to the work they were called to do.
The future of healthcare will be a partnership between technology and compassionate care. Physicians like Dr. Vedala are making sure clinicians have a seat at that table. Our job as leaders is to make sure everyone who heals has one too.
Grateful to have recruited him then. Prouder to stand alongside him now.
Where have you seen technology actually give someone back to the work of healing — instead of pulling them away from it? I’d love to hear it
