About Meredith Hurston
I started this blog in 2011 because I believed patients deserved better information.
I was working in healthcare, watching people navigate a system that assumed they already understood it. So I started writing. Medication lists. How to talk to your doctor. Patient rights. Patient safety. It was practical, it was earnest, and it was exactly what I thought I was supposed to be doing.
What I did not expect was that fifteen years of writing would turn out to be a single, winding story about the same thing: how ordinary people make sense of complex systems, and what happens when the tools finally start catching up to the need.
Here is the short version of who I have been:
I started as a health advocate, writing about patients and quality of care. I became a healthcare professional, working in quality improvement and patient safety at a large academic medical center. I spent a few years documenting a career pivot into tech. I had a season of making AI-generated art and falling in love with what these tools could create. I wrote honestly about grief, faith, gardening, and what it means to build a life that feels like yours.
And then in January 2025, I went back to school.
I enrolled in a doctoral program in AI and machine learning because I wanted to understand, at a real technical level, the thing I had been working alongside for years. My dissertation research is in natural language processing and text classification in the domain of healthcare and patient safety. It is the most direct line I have ever drawn between where I started and where I am going.
In March 2026, I published my first book, Algorithmic Oversight, written for clinical lab and patient safety leaders navigating AI adoption without a clear roadmap.
Here is who I am right now:
A healthcare quality professional by day. A doctoral student on nights and weekends. A builder. A writer. A person who has been paying attention to what AI does inside healthcare institutions for longer than it has been fashionable to talk about it.
Lab Notes is the part of this blog where I document that work honestly. Not the highlight reel. The actual process, including the confusion, the breakthroughs, the tools that help, and the ones that do not.
If you are in healthcare and trying to figure out what AI actually means for your work, you are in the right place. If you are just curious what it looks like when someone builds in public without pretending they have it all figured out, you are also in the right place.
Where to start:
- My AI Workflow Starts With a Voice Memo — the first Lab Notes post, and a good example of what this newsletter is about
- Algorithmic Oversight on Amazon — my book for clinical lab and patient safety leaders
- Subscribe to Lab Notes on Substack — weekly newsletter, free to start
I have been writing here since 2011. I am glad you found your way to it.
Meredith
