Who I Am
I'm Andrea. Latta, to anyone who knows me well enough to skip the formalities.
By training I'm a GP, currently practicing in Hamilton, New Zealand, after years in Italy and nearly eight years as a Navy physician before that, ships, multinational deployments, NATO advisory work, the kind of settings where you don't get to refer out and hope someone else handles it. My wife is also a GP, we met in medicine, and family life runs on the same rhythm most doctors' households do, busy, a bit improvised, held together anyway.
I've spent most of my life around competition of one kind or another. Semi-professional basketball when I was younger, obstacle course racing at a regional level more recently, the kind of sports that don't reward talent alone, they reward whoever's still standing after everyone else has quietly decided to stop. I'm currently rebuilding after a period of detraining, working through an old asymmetry in my lower back with the same patience I'd expect a patient to have with a slow recovery, which is a good reminder of how hard that patience actually is to practice.
I play chess badly and know it, somewhere around 1100 on chess.com, and I like it precisely because it's a game where you can't blame fatigue or bad luck for long, eventually you just have to get better at seeing the board.
Professionally, the thread that connects Goose, the sub-investigator work on clinical trials, and fifteen years of general practice across two very different health systems, is that I don't think good medicine and rigor are things you choose between under pressure. Real practice is messy, incomplete histories, time you don't have, decisions you make anyway. I've never wanted to pretend otherwise, and I don't think tools built for this space should pretend otherwise either.
I'm not looking for the spotlight on this. I've watched people build reputations in AI-and-healthcare from conference stages and comfortable distance from actual patients, and I don't think that's where the useful answers live. I think they live with the people doing the twenty-consult days, who don't have time to write the paper about it. I'm one of those people. I'd like to talk with anyone who thinks that perspective is worth having in the room.