Dr. Ed Kimlin, MaineHealth

“I tell everyone that AI is a tool. Think of it like a chainsaw.

People in Maine are extremely self-sufficient. We work incredibly hard, and we believe in ourselves as the doers. This comes from preparing for brutal winters, dealing with massive piles of wood to keep your family warm.

Here's the thing about cutting wood: you could spend all day swinging an ax, wearing yourself out, getting maybe a tenth of what you need done. Or you can fire up a chainsaw and cut through the same amount of wood in an hour, with precision and power that no amount of manual effort could match. People in Maine are outstanding at using chainsaws because they understand the difference between working hard and working smart.

Maine is a microcosm of what makes our country special. Ingenuity, hard work, and an independent spirit set America apart. Other countries sometimes call us overconfident, but that belief in ourselves is what's made America the place where people from all over the world come to flourish.

I think AI enhances the American spirit by bringing in ingenuity and innovation while preserving what makes us uniquely human. If we can master that partnership—AI handling data and documentation while humans focus on empathy and complex medical judgment —we don't just save our healthcare system. We create a model to show the world how technology can accelerate human potential.

I used to spend an hour manually crafting appeals to fight insurance denials…cross-referencing charts while writing detailed responses by hand. Swinging that ax over and over. With AI, I spend ten minutes and get better, more thorough results. The AI finds details I might have missed, applies criteria more comprehensively than I could manually, and produces appeals that are more precise and powerful. Even when we lose, we win, because we've done our job more thoroughly in a fraction of the time.

I love my chainsaw. I'm going to master it, because in rural America, we embrace the tools that eliminate wasteful manual effort and make us unstoppable. Why would I go back to the ax? There’s just too much administrative burden to cut through to be effective using the wrong tool. Getting the job done is how we build trust with the people who are counting on us. So why not deliver the best work possible by using the right tool?”