Patients use AI more than their doctors. Next steps?

Reporting from CES 2025 Digital Health Summit in Las Vegas, HealthLeaders' Eric Wicklund hears from provider execs who warn that new technologies such as AI are empowering consumers to take control of their health and demand that their doctors catch up. These execs caution that providers must get in front of innovative ideas like virtual care, digital health and AI to meet consumers where they want to be met and give them the care they're demanding.

This shift in patient expectations creates the potential (or perhaps the threat) of an empowered consumer, armed with their own health data and demanding AI-enabled care at the time and place of their choosing.

Laura Adams, RN, a senior advisor for the National Academy of Medicine, part of Kaiser Permanente's Institute for Health Policy, says the healthcare industry is nearing a tipping point where consumers will have more experience with AI than with their doctors and nurses. Healthcare providers need to keep up, she says, adding that "the revolution is very much underway."

How? The medical-industrial complex, the foot soldiers in the trenches and patients are struggling to win the 5th industrial revolution.

Here are some ways to close the doctor-patient expectations gaps

Learn the ABCDEs of the 5th industrial revolution

Moving forward, our sick care strategies and tactics should be guided by:

Appropriate rules, regulations, and rights

Addressing the threats of the technology-industrial complex

Education and training reform

Equitable access to tools

Cultural and organizational transformation

Reconciling the conflicts between the business of medicine and the practice of medical judgement

Fixing busted trust

Appropriate AI guidance, augmentation, and assistance to achieve the sextuple aims

Cybersecurity, confidentiality, and privacy

Public/patient education

Data, semantic and information interoperability

An appropriate balance of techno-optimism and techno skepticism

Policies and procedures to adapt to the inevitable workforce transformation

Restore confidence and trust in expertise

Help stakeholders lead AI and digital organizational and personal transformation

Encourage AIntrepreneurship

Medical schools need to answer what business they are in

We need entrepreneurial medical schools

Intrapreneur Survival Skills

Why hire physician intrapreneurs... and what to do with them once you have?

Sick care is plagued with problems and each one is an opportunity to do the jobs stakeholders want us to do.

Patients’ use of artificial intelligence, or patient AI (PAI), is now widespread, promising both benefits and risks. There is an urgent need to assist patients with using these new technologies as safely and effectively as possible. Focusing on patients’ use of large language models (LLMs) for health care purposes, this article explores critical issues in the management of generative PAI in the United States, including constitutional limits on government’s regulatory authority, and identifies opportunities for public and private actors to help patients take advantage of generative PAI safely. With respect to the public sector, there is a critical need for federal action to fund research on the benefits and risks of PAI and on the development of valid metrics and performance standards for PAI. The federal government also needs to better protect the privacy and security of patient data shared with PAI, and to require transparency with respect to how LLMs used for health care purposes are funded, how they are developed, and how they perform.

Fix the doctor-patient-administrator value gaps

What are you waiting for? Create the future. Don't waste your time predicting it.

How to be a value driven physician

Like the saying goes, it is already here, just unevenly distributed.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and an Advisor at Cliexa and MI10