e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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Free kidney cancer patient information day from the hospital that saved me. Please share.

As long-time readers know, in 2007 I nearly died from a severe case of kidney cancer. One thing that saved me was being very well informed by information I got from an online patient community … information that was valid but did not exist in the medical literature. (They’re now at SmartPatients.)

So my hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess, decided to start producing an annual patient information symposium, as part of the Dana Farber Harvard Cancer Center, to share such cutting-edge information directly to patients (and other clinicians of course). Free! Both online and virtual.

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Governing wildfires: What we can learn about AI from our history with cars

I asked GPT-4o for an image representing AI as a powerful wild horse pulling a Roman chariot with five people in it. Here’s what I got. Impressive, but not quite right: not a chariot, and not five people(! … how hard is THAT to get right??)

An analogy came up last month that I think bears discussion, and I wonder what you think. Everyone knows we have to watch out for AI’s dangers, but the same was true when cars were new. And electricity. And machinery. How do we learn to move forward – to enjoy new power – without horrible risks??

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Include patient users in co-creation of AI and related policy. The need is urgent! #PatientsUseAI

There’s something important in this, so I hope you’ll give it some thought. Patients are being overlooked as users of artificial intelligence (ChatGPT etc), and we need to fix that.

On March 22 I spoke in Boston as the consumer (aka patient) voice on an important panel. The event was the annual AMIA Informatics Summit, and the panel was the latest in an ongoing project on how to be responsible yet effective about AI’s immense potential to improve healthcare. (More on the project below.)

Most of the 90 minute session was reserved for audience Q&A, so for opening statements, each of us five panelists was only given 7 minutes. Yikes! So I did what any empowered person would do: did my best in 7 minutes, then came home and recorded what I wanted to say … which took 20 minutes. :-) For the impatient, the video is above, or you can read the discussion below first.

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Exploring: “I use it to help me think” … #PatientsUseAI, example 2

Next in the series about the new hashtag #PatientsUseAI. It’s important that medicine know this, because our priorities can be different from the industry’s, and we need this powerful tool too.

My first post said that while the world rushes to regulate AI, healthcare is ignoring patients as actual users of the technology. And that’s a huge oversight that we must fix.

Patients have real work to do.
AI can help do it.

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