Power to the Patient!
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.
On Monday I called for us to start using a new hashtag #PatientsUseAI, because we in the patient community keep seeing doctors and regulators and businesses talk about industry using AI, and nobody’s taking into account that we out here are using it too – and we may have different priorities. The graphic at right spotlighted five ways patients are already using AI. This post is the first in a series about them.
September 11, 2023 will live forever in my memory as bringing the most crystal-clear contrast I’ve ever seen between the paternal old guard and an arriving new reality: patients with real problems using artificial intelligence (AI) to help improve outcomes. That morning, at the annual meeting of the global standards organization HL7, a famous doctor gave a speech about AI, and near the end he said:
“It is just too early for us to give generative AI to patients
and expect that the results will be good.”
This post is a departure from my usual: it’s about a specific company, for a specific reason. First, some background.
Since 2007, Thanksgiving has been a time of reflection for me. That’s the year I was diagnosed as almost dead, yet by Fall I got to hear “looks like you beat it!” What a Thanksgiving that was.
I know firsthand that when a person like me is in need, being cared for and about makes all the difference.
[Read more…]A quarter century ago, in the early years of the Web, a seminal book was published by four marketing wizards: The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. Its central point was that the internet was going to completely change marketing, because it made information flow freely, to and between consumers. Importantly, it consisted of 95 theses, patterned explicitly after the 95 theses Martin Luther nailed to the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.
I’m among the advisory vanguard for NextMed Health, and I’m hoping to speak there too. I hope you’ll come. Register here, or email me for a discount code.
In August Medical Futurist Bertalan Meskó and I published Patient Design: The Importance of Including Patients in Designing Health Care in JMIR, in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). It ties together aspects of both our work. He’s a medical futurist, less than half my age, with a clear vision of how medicine will work in a future unencumbered by today’s limits. For me, an advocate for patient empowerment, it’s rooted in patients having the power to get the care they want. Our views come together in the idea of patients designing the care they want. From our abstract:
[Read more…]… genuinely empowered people living their lives and managing their health according to their own priorities, in partnership and consultation with physicians as needed.