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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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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Researching a difficult diagnosis: #PatientsUseAI, example 1

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.”

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