Is AI finally the answer to all medical mysteries?

How average are you? In many ways, none of us, not even you, are in all ways the “average” person represented by the clinical trials that are used to identify potential new life-saving devices and medications? So why does healthcare treat you like you’re average?

In reality, it can be very difficult to identify what the effect of a therapy will be on you before you take it; we won’t know the side effects, benefits, nor the risk of treatment failure. In simple terms, averaging results is the best that we can do to find treatments that will save as many patients as we can in a given population.

What if this didn’t have to be? What if, by chance, we had some way to gather massive amounts of phenotypic and genotypic information on patients - and the capabilities in hand to analyze the ways in which these facts about you would predispose you to succeeding or failing a treatment trial?

In other words, Dr. Jehangir Appoo is asking, why isn’t medicine more personalized given the prevalence of digital medicine and artificial intelligence?

While Reddit and the news cycle has been alike with examples of ChatGPT passing medical licensing exams and law bar exams, Artificial Intelligence is still in its infancy. Just take a look at these ChatGPT replies to prompts - they don’t even make sense sometimes!

But Dr. Appoo, once trailblazer for cardiac surgery in Alberta, Canada, knowing that artificial intelligence is in its infancy, believes that all jobs will be augmented by AI some day. In fact, he and his network are betting through their investments in AIoT Health that this will become true in medicine as well.

“From an investment point of view, Heath-tech is an attractive opportunity, given that digital technology has already been validated in diverse fields such as communication, finance, retail and entertainment.

Healthcare has the opportunity to leverage learnings and not have to re-invent the wheel. With AIoT Health’s experience at the front lines of healthcare, we can identify the niches and crevices where digital technology can have clinically meaningful impact beyond mere “nice to have” technology.”

In doing so, he hopes to “rewrite the boundaries of healthcare” in the way that information is shared, and so that devices, robotics, and AI in health can be used to lead to “exponential health improvement".

So what does this mean in English? Simply put, Dr. Appoo has succeeded before in medicine, and he’s working with others who have had success in fields necessary to bring medical devices to market so that he can create a world where medicine isn’t for the literal average Joe.

It’ll be for you.

Want to hear more about Dr. Appoo’s work? Check out our interview with him here: https://plnk.to/howitsmed/e/1000583557894