There’s a lot of excitement around how AI can finally enable personalized or precision medicine.

The promise is that if we collect enough new data—genomics, biomarkers, lifestyle data, wearable data—we’ll be able to tailor treatment precisely to each person. Sometimes that’s true. But two things are often overlooked: we don’t always have truly personalized treatments available, and even when we do, they’re not always better than standard, evidence-based care.

Meanwhile, a much more basic problem persists.

We often struggle to apply standard care correctly because clinicians don’t have a clear, usable understanding of a patient’s existing medical history. Prior diagnoses, medications, imaging, and allergies exist, but they’re unavailable, fragmented, buried in notes, or hard to reconstruct at the moment decisions are made.

I think there’s an underappreciated opportunity here: whole-chart medicine.

Whole-chart medicine rests on three pillars: clinical information should be available, salient, and interpretable. In other words, it’s about making existing medical information accessible, relevant, and understandable, so care decisions are grounded in a complete picture of what’s already happened.

This is where today’s AI actually fits well.

LLMs may eventually help discover new patterns or diagnoses, but those uses are hard to validate and require extensive evidence. By contrast, when LLMs summarize and reorganize existing records—timelines, problem lists, treatment histories—the results are easy to audit against the chart and immediately useful. And the truth is, not every patient needs a new diagnosis, but every doctor-patient interaction benefits from clarity about what has already happened and been documented.

So why hasn’t this been the focus?

Startup incentives favor new apps and wearables—ways of generating new data that companies can fully control, own, and analyze—rather than engaging deeply with existing systems, workflows, and messy legacy data. That work may seem less exciting and more challenging, but it’s not actually harder. It’s just different from consumer tech. And it has clear potential to raise the value of healthcare everywhere. It’s exactly where collaboration between clinicians and tech matters most.

Personalized medicine may define the future. But whole-chart medicine is how we make healthcare work better today.