Featured Perspective
Dr. Ananya Sharma
Critical Care Physician & Clinical Informaticist
Whitfield Memorial Hospital
Clinical software should never ask physicians to trust a recommendation without understanding the evidence behind it.
In the ICU, a recommendation without a reason is just another alarm. Dr. Ananya Sharma spent a decade watching clinicians override, ignore, or quietly distrust decision-support tools that couldn't explain themselves — and came to believe the failure wasn't in the underlying models, but in what they were allowed to withhold. This piece traces her shift from treating explainability as a compliance checkbox to treating it as the actual product: a system's recommendation and its reasoning are not two features, they're one. She argues that the clinicians who resist new tools most loudly are often the ones asking the most reasonable question in the room — not "is this accurate," but "accurate according to what, and how would I know if it stopped being accurate." A case for building software that survives being argued with, because in critical care, being argued with is the job.