"The Dawn of Patient Autonomy"

#PatientsUseAI was the opening keynote at Frontiers Health in Berlin

This post is not about what patients are doing with AI; it’s about what we can now see clearly is on the horizon because of what patients are doing. I gave a talk about it in Berlin in October, and the 16 minute video is now out. I hope you’ll watch the whole thing:

It turned out to be one of the most challenging talks I’ve ever done, yet one of the most impactful. The speech — and the conference, Frontiers Health — were summarized superbly in Deep Dive magazine, published by pharmaphorum and edited by Eloise McLennan. Here’s a screen capture from that link:

Why this topic matters

It’s becoming abundantly clear that as leading-edge patients discover what power they can access with generic AIs, we’re expanding the world of how much we can do using AI as a “home remedy” sometimes.

Sometimes. And if you read this blog, you’ve seen some stories. It’s real.

I’m not saying doctors will disappear! More “home remedies” is a good thing for the workload of burned-out physicians! Helping patients solve their own problems, sometimes, will be good for many many patients, which I hope will relieve workload:

• People in the US who have a ridiculous wait for an appointment, like Hugo Campos’s father (three months)

• People in the UK (and other countries) whose local health system is in breakdown so they can’t get appointments

• People in developing nations who have no access at all to a modern health system

• People anywhere who are at their wit’s end because the treatment’s not working and the docs are out of answers

• People anywhere who can’t afford it.

For all these people, we now have clear signs that it’s sometimes possible for people to take action successfully on their own. That’s patient autonomy. Here’s the closing slide I used:

(The definition is my own.)

Patient stories from this blog, mentioned in the talk: James Cummings, Hugo Campos, Courtney Morales Hoffman, Sue Sheridan.

“Empowerment happens by removing constraints.”

If you watched the video, you saw that quote from the World Bank. If you didn’t watch it, do so. If you don’t understand this, you and your organization are going to be blindsided.

An unusual conference

The speech speaks for itself, but I want to give a shout out to the conference. It’s not a big money event and the only “exhibits” were meet-and-greet seating areas around the dining area. I was also impressed that one speaker they chose was Bart De Witte, the open-source AI guy from Hippo AI Foundation. I’ve known him for years. He’s a sharp thinker and not known for sucking up to people, if you know what I mean :-) … he’s astute and a straight shooter who challenged us to think about what we’re doing and why. Example: you know all the valid concerns about the vast energy consumption of generative AI models? In May he told me he’s got an open source LLM that runs on one laptop.

I could say more, but I’ll leave it to interested parties to look into the event themselves.

Why was it challenging, from a speechwriting perspective?

• It was a new kind of audience, because Frontiers Health is an unusual conference. It’s business oriented but it’s not about “Where’s my unicorn?” It has a lot of pharma discussion about new treatments, but it’s not about the pharma business. It’s legit “the frontiers.”

• As a keynoter, I see how the arriving future is evolving rapidly (and I mean it - what’s possible is really changing fast) but that’s useless to an evangelist if they can’t help others see it too. This is not easy.

• I had an hour of content, but just like my TED Talk, they wanted it done in 16 minutes. Part of me hates that this is the direction conferences are heading, but as I often say, “If you live long enough, things change.” Adapt.

• All my lines of thought (and slides) are well practiced, and they don’t add up to 16 minutes.

What to do? On the plane over, I gave up and handed the problem to ChatGPT. I told it my worries (yes you can say such things to genAI) as well as my objectives, and I uploaded all the slides I wanted to use. We talked for hours, and it corrected my thinking on the sequence I should use for waving my ideas together. Tomorrow I’ll post more about how that GPT conversation went.

It worked. In addition to what Deep Dive magazine said, 75 people friended me on LinkedIn. (It’s not my goal to grow my followers list, but it indicates how compelling it evidently was to the audience — and that’s what matters to an evangelist.

More to come. Things are changing.