There was a time when a doctor’s visit actually meant visiting a patient in their home. Today’s healthcare model is usually focused on queuing patients to wait first for booking an appointment, followed by waiting for the pre-visit formalities, before actually meeting the physician. During the appointment, it’s rare to get eye contact, at least in the United States where doctors are shackled to the keyboard, furiously adding their notes in the EHR (electronic health record) system. This is equally true for both in-person and online appointments so the savings in commute time haven’t really resulted in shorter queues or improved quality of care beyond a certain point.
Each problem reveals an opportunity, and it’s timely as Generative AI finally steps into the healthcare limelight, see my post from 2018. The generative part is really helpful in this use case, once trained on the medical lexicon it can imitate well. So now the doctor can finally lift their gaze and have an engaging patient conversation, the AI scribe can take notes, summarize and segment appropriately. It’s a fortunate development I think, and a pretty cool coincidence that the paper on transformers was called, “attention is all you need“, though in a different context of course. The doctor can finally pay attention to the patient, hopefully the recall linked errors are eliminated due to the live capture, with an accessible and digitized workflow. The general cases of AI in healthcare seem to be ramping up well with innovation across the industry as a scribe, in drug discovery for protein structure prediction and triage using AI driven bots.
What’s next can be extrapolated as AI steps towards specialization, say from a general physician visit to a specialist scribe fine tuned for oncology, across different languages. From general drugs to bespoke gene therapies that are the beginning of truly personalized medicine. Moving beyond general bots that help navigate websites or phone trees to dedicated personalized health assistants that truly know me, by touch, through my smart watch or ring, by sound, by hearing me through earphones, and maybe even by sight, seeing my perspective with smart lenses. I hope to see a rapid pace of innovation ahead, that can leapfrog healthcare by truly democratizing it, improving access to care and improving lives everywhere.
Rad@Sami 