I am Azra Bihorac.

Physician, scientist, institution builder. I write here on what AI is asking of medicine, and what medicine must not let go of.

D major · The institutional voice

I am the R. Glenn Davis Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Surgery, Anesthesiology, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida. I serve as Senior Associate Dean for Research at the UF College of Medicine and as Founding Director of the UF AI for Health Institute. My clinical training is in nephrology, critical care, neurocritical care, and biomedical informatics. I lead NIH-funded programs in perioperative and critical care medicine and in clinical AI, including work under the NIH Bridge2AI Common Fund. My peer-reviewed work appears in JAMA, Nature, Lancet Digital Health, Intensive Care Medicine, Annals of Surgery, and NEJM AI.

I am an elected member of the Association of American Physicians (AAP) and the Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida (ASEMFL).

D minor · The personal voice

I arrived in the United States in 1999 with two suitcases and a four-year-old daughter. I had done my medical training in Sarajevo and Istanbul during and after the Bosnian War. I know what it means for institutions to hold, and to fail. I know what it means to rebuild them.

Institutions are living systems. They require stewardship, adaptation, and trust. My interior homeland is language, music, and memory.

D Phrygian · The philosophical voice

I believe the AI era will be won or lost inside academic medical centers. Either we build the governance, the pipelines, and the interior discipline to translate AI into attentive medicine, or we drift into a thinner medicine that will not hold. Attentive medicine keeps the human at the center of the work. Thinner medicine does not.

Lorca called it duende: the dark, embodied intelligence that cannot be summoned or faked. Medicine is duende work. The bedside asks for it. The training rooms and the ICU ask for it. AI cannot supply it, but AI can either free clinicians to give it, or crowd them out of the room.

Nonalgorithmic is the record of that argument, in two voices. Kidney Love simply lowers one note, the way D major becomes D minor, and everything tender in the song steps forward. The newsletter says what I believe medicine must hold onto. Kidney Love says what the holding costs, and what it protects.