An online friend, Brian Hennon, works in hospice and is deeply interested in respecting the traditions of different faiths regarding goals of care and end-of-life conversations.

Power to the Patient!
An online friend, Brian Hennon, works in hospice and is deeply interested in respecting the traditions of different faiths regarding goals of care and end-of-life conversations.
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??
[Read more…]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.
[Read more…]If you can, please come to the Netherlands in May for this conference. It’s a big deal for me in more ways than one: it’s in Maastricht, the city where the European Union was formed in 1993 and the city where I gave my TED Talk in 2011. Thirteen years ago – and boy has a lot happened since then!
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.”