Power to the Patient!
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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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.”
I’ve been learning everything I can about what AI will do to help healthcare achieve its potential, and especially how it will help e-patients be stronger contributors. The game’s not over (this game will never be over) but so far, this is the book! The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond.
[Read more…]Regular readers know I love data, especially my own health data. This post isn’t about health data, but it makes my favorite point: knowledge is power, and it’s empowering to know what’s going on. Am I right?
Last year we got a nifty thing for home energy management, and this summer it detected a small disaster in process that would have cost us hundreds of dollars. At the peak of AC season in July, this notification popped up on my phone one morning: my electricity consumption was FOUR TIMES normal:
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.