Imagine this. It’s 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. Your throat is on fire, your head is pounding, and you’re trying to figure out whether you should tough it out until morning or drag yourself to an emergency room. You open your phone, tap an app, and within seconds you’re talking to an AI that already knows your full medical history. Every allergy, every medication, every lab result you’ve ever had. It asks you smart questions, analyzes your symptoms alongside everything it knows about you, and gives you a clear, personalized recommendation. No waiting room. No hold music. No copay.

Now imagine that system isn’t a dream. It’s your actual primary care. And it might just be the greatest improvement to healthcare in a generation.

The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

Here’s a number that should make everyone uncomfortable: the average wait time to see a new primary care doctor in the United States is 26 days. In some cities, it’s closer to two months. And that’s just to get through the door. Once you arrive, you’ll spend an average of 45 minutes in the waiting room before a doctor sees you for roughly 15 to 18 minutes.

Think about what that means. If something is wrong with you, really wrong, you might spend weeks waiting, days worrying, and then get less than twenty minutes of someone’s attention. And during those twenty minutes, your doctor is also charting notes, checking a computer screen, and trying to stay on schedule because there are fifteen more patients lined up behind you.

An AI-first system would demolish that bottleneck. You’d have access the moment you needed it. Not next Tuesday. Not after a phone tree. Right now.

A System That Actually Knows You

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about traditional primary care: your doctor probably doesn’t remember you that well. They see thousands of patients. They rely on whatever’s in your chart, which may be incomplete, outdated, or scattered across multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. They’re doing their best with a broken system, but “their best” is still limited by human memory and fragmented records.

An AI-first system wouldn’t forget. It wouldn’t lose your file. It wouldn’t mix you up with another patient. Every conversation you’ve ever had, every symptom you’ve reported, every test result, every medication change, it would all be there, instantly accessible, and actively analyzed. The AI wouldn’t just store your information; it would think about it. It would notice patterns a human might miss, like the fact that your headaches always spike two weeks after a medication change, or that your blood pressure readings have been creeping up slowly over eighteen months.

This isn’t hypothetical. Pattern recognition across large datasets is exactly what AI does better than humans. A doctor sees maybe 20 patients a day. An AI system can draw on millions of cases to identify what’s happening with you.

More Accurate. Less Expensive. More Accessible.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: if we’re assuming this AI makes excellent recommendations, more accurate than a human doctor, in fact, then the case becomes overwhelming.

Medical errors are officially the third, arguably the first, leading cause of death in the United States. That’s because the top two killers, heart disease and cancer, are the two most misdiagnosed. That’s not because doctors are careless. It’s because medicine is staggeringly complex, humans get tired, and the system is designed to push physicians past their limits. A doctor finishing their twelfth hour of a shift is not operating at peak performance. An AI doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t have a bad day. It doesn’t rush because it’s running behind schedule.

Then there’s cost. The average primary care visit in the U.S. costs between $150 and $300 without insurance. With a high deductible plan, it’s also $150 to $250. For the roughly 27 million Americans without health coverage, that’s a barrier that keeps them away from care entirely. They don’t skip the doctor because they don’t care about their health. They skip it because they can’t afford it. An AI-first system could dramatically lower that cost, making quality primary care accessible to people who’ve been priced out of the system for years.

And accessibility goes beyond money. Think about rural communities where the nearest doctor is an hour’s drive away. Think about people with disabilities who struggle to get to a clinic. Think about parents who can’t take time off work. Think about elderly patients who are isolated and alone. An AI-first model meets all of them exactly where they are, at home, on their phone, at any hour.

The Human Is Still There

One of the most important features of this model is what happens when the AI reaches its limits: it escalates to a human. This isn’t about replacing doctors. It’s about using them where they matter most.

Right now, a huge portion of primary care visits are for issues that are relatively straightforward. A sinus infection, a prescription refill, a routine check-in on a managed condition. These visits consume enormous amounts of physician time. If an AI could handle those interactions competently, and in our scenario, it handles them better than competently, then human doctors would be freed up to focus on the cases that genuinely need a human touch: complex diagnoses, emotional conversations, difficult treatment decisions, the moments where a patient needs someone to look them in the eye and say, “We’re going to figure this out together.”

In other words, AI-first care wouldn’t dehumanize medicine. It would re-humanize it by giving doctors the time and space to be fully present when patients need them most.

Catching Problems Before They Become Catastrophes

Perhaps the most exciting promise of AI-first primary care is prevention. Our current system is overwhelmingly reactive. You get sick, you go to the doctor, they treat you. But what if your AI was quietly monitoring trends in your data and flagged a concern before you even felt symptoms?

“Your resting heart rate has increased 12% over the past three months. Combined with your family history of cardiac disease, I’d recommend we schedule some blood work and an EKG.”

That kind of proactive, personalized monitoring could catch cancers earlier, prevent heart attacks, identify mental health crises before they escalate, and manage chronic diseases far more effectively. It’s the difference between a fire department that only shows up after your house burns down and one that installs smoke detectors in every room.

The Equity Argument

Today, the quality of your healthcare depends enormously on where you live, how much money you make, what color your skin is, and whether you have good insurance. That’s not a healthcare system. That’s a lottery.

AI-first primary care could be one of the great equalizers. A single mother working two jobs in rural Mississippi would have access to the same quality of medical analysis as a tech executive in Manhattan. The AI doesn’t care about your zip code, your income, or your background. It gives everyone the same thorough, evidence-based, personalized attention.

For communities that have been historically underserved by the medical system, communities of color, low-income neighborhoods, immigrant populations, Indigenous communities, this could represent the most meaningful expansion of healthcare access in decades.

Addressing the Skeptics

Of course, there are legitimate concerns. What about data privacy? What about the loss of human connection? What about accountability when something goes wrong? These are serious questions that deserve serious answers and thoughtful regulation.

But consider this: we already trust algorithms with enormously consequential decisions. Navigation apps guide us through traffic. Autopilot systems help fly commercial airplanes. Automated systems monitor nuclear power plants. In each case, we didn’t abandon the technology because of theoretical risks. We built safeguards, created oversight, and made the systems better.

Healthcare deserves the same bold thinking. The current system isn’t just imperfect. For millions of people, it’s failing. Long waits, rushed visits, crushing costs, and unequal access are not minor inconveniences. They are life-and-death problems.

The Bottom Line

AI-first primary care isn’t about choosing machines over people. It’s about building a system that’s smarter, faster, cheaper, and fairer, one that uses artificial intelligence to handle what it does best so that human doctors can do what they do best.

It’s available at 2 a.m. when you’re scared. It remembers everything about you. It catches problems early. It doesn’t discriminate based on income or geography. And when it reaches the limits of what technology can do, it puts you in the hands of a doctor who finally has the time to give you their full attention.

That’s not a dystopia. That’s the healthcare system every person deserves.

Doctors are human. That’s why there’s Medome. www.medome.ai

The question isn’t whether AI-First Primary Care™ would be a great thing. The question is how fast we can implement it, and how many lives we’ll lose while we wait.