Cancer turns Digital Medicine CEO Jen Goldsack to #PatientsUseAI
"I've used AI more in my personal life in the last 2 months than ever before, as I’ve worked to better understand my diagnosis"
There’s not much for me to say in this post, because once again the patient herself tells the story.
Today on LinkedIn, colleague Jen Goldsack wrote a great post that her recent stage 3 cancer diagnosis has her using generative AI in a slew of new ways. I reposted it, reformatting her list of examples (verbatim) like this:
✅ I’ve used AI chatbots to prepare for discussions with my care team
✅ hell, even to prepare for telling my elderly parents, 5,000 miles away, that their kid has cancer without causing distress.
✅ I’ve used it to fight insurance denials,
✅ figure out a meal plan that works for me
✅ (and build shopping lists to make it easier),
✅ and even create a Google Sheet to help funnel kind offers of support from friends and family
Look! ⬆️ It’s a lot of work to be sick. AI can help.
Patient advocates like Trisha Torrey and Grace Cordovano and many others have said for years: It’s a lot of work to be sick. Look at all the tasks in Jen’s list - they are all net incremental work, on top of whatever work her life has already entailed. And just for fun, you get to do all that while sick.
It’s even a lot of work for an organized, world-class competitor.
If you’ve ever gotten email from Jen you’ve seen “OLY” in her email signature. She’s entitled to use that because she’s a genuine Olympian: she competed on the 2008 US Olympic team. Comparable skills in organizing and execution are part of her work as CEO of DiMe, the Digital Medicine Society, which is how I met her.
If I understand correctly, Jen starts treatment this week. Of course we all wish her the best. Follow her here on LinkedIn, for whatever posts she puts out. And I’m thrilled that she’s openly discussing how important #PatientsUseAI has already been for her - and she’s just getting started.
Again, her post specifically about this, today, is here.