AI-First Healthcare

Chapter 3. Monitoring + AI = Rx for Personal Health

This chapter describes how intense personalization and continuous monitoring should and can become a reality for healthcare. With AI we can do more than predict, diagnose, and treat a disease. AI can help with continuous monitoring of a person’s health, suggesting adjustments before a patient progresses along the disease continuum from healthy to at-risk to chronically ill (or wherever they might be on the continuum). AI has the potential to help with missed diagnoses and misdiagnoses, challenging current healthcare models. It is not a quick fix. This chapter is not about empty hyperbole or endless platitudes, but it does require imagination and a vision of how healthcare can work.

Let’s start with an adapted real-life patient scenario. It was the beginning of summer in 2005, and Bethanie, a 28-year-old schoolteacher, was in the best physical condition of her life. However, when several troubling symptoms started to appear, she realized something was not right. Her symptoms began during a trip to help her friend move to Reno. Because of the dry, hot climate in Nevada, she chalked up her excessive thirst and her need to get up in the middle of the night to urinate—which she had never done before—to the fact that she was drinking more water than usual. During the eight-hour drive back home to Orange County, California, she developed an insatiable thirst and found herself stopping for cold beverages many times along the way.

Once ...