e-Patient Dave

Power to the Patient!

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The AI Revolution, Revisited: It’s Succeeding at Real Work

When The AI Revolution in Medicine came out in 2023, I called it the best book I’d seen on AI in healthcare, because it resonated deeply with realities I’d heard in thousands of conversations at hundreds of conferences. Today we can say with confidence that co-authors Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, and Zak Kohane correctly anticipated not just the scientific impact, but the human and institutional realities of what would unfold when generative AI entered medical practice.

And the impact of patients using it.

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“The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited”: new podcast series updating this great book, two years on. The intro is out.

Eons ago (2023), in ChatGPT’s first year, I blogged about a truly exciting book that had just come out: The AI Revolution in Medicine. Evidently I liked it – here’s the header of that post:

I still haven’t seen anything better on the subject. And here’s the amazing thing: despite the extraordinary rate of change in AI, the book’s held up amazingly well.

So I was thrilled to be invited by lead author Peter Lee to be a guest in a new series he’s doing about the book two years on, on the Microsoft Research podcast. My episode will be out in April.

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“Your Map to the Future”: learning to deal with disturbingly uncertain times

This is my first post in months, and isn’t specific to healthcare. I’m doing it for a couple of reasons. First, this is an important new book by one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever known, and second, it’s about a dangerous situation that’s driving a lot of people nuts. The danger is real, and I think there’s a way to not lose our minds over it.

As I approach age 75, I’m in a position to say this bluntly: we live in disturbingly uncertain times, and “we” includes you. I say this as someone who’s spent his whole career working to understand what’s going on under the surface, whether it was in graphic arts or then in healthcare. Such questions require asking a lot of “Why??” so that any improvement you propose can be built on understand what’s eternal.

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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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