The Beginning of the Coalition of Medicine and AI
Sunaina Saharan*
Technical Lead, HCL America Inc.
*Corresponding Author: Sunaina Saharan, Technical Lead, HCL America Inc.
Published: July 23, 2024
Abstract
It was the middle of August 2023, a fine Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn. Running around with my fellow international medical students in Dr. Hameed’s office, taking history, participating in patient care, and trying to soak up the essence of the American healthcare model, we were waiting for Dr. Moskowitz to come to the office for our research undertakings.
Dr. Hameed’s office was a melting pot for us South Asian students to do our clinical rotations. A humble-looking office space could easily be mistaken for just another medical office. But looking closely, there were some striking differences. Great ideas were discussed here casually. The Global Population Health Management Forum was born here, as were dozens of other initiatives aimed at improving America’s healthcare delivery for the better.
Soon we were called by Dr. Hameed to the basement for the meeting, and the almost 80-year-old genius was there. Dr. Moskowitz had the zeal and excitement of an 8-year-old and two-dollar bills for every single one of us as a grandfatherly gesture.
Munching on the figs, he instructed one of us to open the Bimileap and create the questionnaire on a patient scenario. I volunteered and went further, picking up the scenario where a patient demanded herbal remedies instead of allopathic medication for his diabetes. This scenario is far too commonly encountered in rural India by medical practitioners than I would like to admit.
By the end of it, we got the idea book which discussed all possible questions a patient might come up with and a solution tailor-made to each of them, with a grading scale between 1 to 10. The questionnaire was then distributed to the patients in the clinic during triage, and they had to rate how they felt about each of the physician’s responses as a patient.
By the end of it, we got to know how each patient could be approached to most sensibly resolve the difficult situations that might inadvertently arise during patient care. This initiative is beautiful, to say the least. It puts the patients center stage, equips the doctors with the ability to improve their approach to the patient, and creates an online library for future doctors to refer to.
Since then, this initiative undertook over 10 patient scenarios, and the students enthusiastically took projects related to their initiatives to publish. We are improvising our approach with each project, fine-tuning the papers, diversifying the patient scenarios, and publishing more each day. I see this project finding its use in future healthcare decision-making too, as it has a wide library of general patient consensus, their perspective towards healthcare, and how they prefer to be treated by the doctor in the office.
Creativity and a continuous desire to change things for the better can put such projects in motion, often in a serendipitous way in humble settings such as a medical office in Brooklyn. AI is the future, and medicine can be perfectly integrated with it through such ingenious projects. I was just lucky enough to be one of the few who took part in laying the foundation of this with this prodigy, who I fondly refer to as my grandpa and mentor.