21st Century Flexner Moment: Charting our Course through Medicine's AI Revolution
Walking through the AMA ChangeMedEd 2025 meeting, I felt the familiar tug of a Flexner moment. So much of the agenda, workshops, and posters leaned into AI as a force reshaping how we teach, assess, and practice. The message was unmistakable: if AI is now better at facts, pattern recognition, and organizing knowledge, then the uniquely human work of medicine must come into sharper focus.
The most promising future isn't one where AI replaces physicians, but where human-AI collaboration outperforms either working alone. This "human-in-the-loop" approach ensures quality and safety while leveraging AI's analytical power alongside human expertise, empathy, and ethical reasoning. In anesthesiology, this might mean AI systems continuously monitoring patient status and alerting us of subtle changes, while we focus on complex decision-making, patient communication, and leading the perioperative team. AI could handle routine documentation and administrative tasks, which are major sources of physician burnout, freeing us to focus on the aspects of care that require human judgment and connection.