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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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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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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Dump the jive from JPM & VIVE: seek real change with me at NextMed Health

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.

Daniel Kraft’s events are different.

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The Long COVID Survival Guide: essential new book with first-hand patient reality

I’m burning my way through this book, which was just released last week. It’s a compilation of first-person essays and advice from twenty Long COVID patients and experts. Curated by long-hauler Fiona Lowenstein, The Long COVID Survival Guide strikes me as street-level gut-punch practical. I don’t think any of us – patient, family, clinician or government – can feel we understand this condition without reading these essays.

I was hooked when I discovered, in the first patient story, that hives can be a result of Long COVID … which explains the weird, unexplained hives my wife had 4-6 weeks after COVID. Nothing like some front-line patient reality!

That’s a strong example of a big shift that’s happening in medicine: shifting away from expecting doctors to know everything important, and toward doctors actively partnering with the sick people. And by “partnering” I don’t mean asking patients’ opinions: I mean actually sharing the work, acknowledging the value of patients’ work, and sharing decision making – not just on individual cases but on development of remedies and priorities for research.

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