Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on the edge of my consciousness as a great hope for solving many of the problems in clinical medicine for maybe a decade. In 2011 IBM created a program called Watson which was able to answer questions in plain English and search data sources for answers quickly enough that it beat 2 humans in a game of Jeopardy. After its success in a game show, the program was used to make a chatbot to help people buy diamonds, to write recipes for Bon Appetit and by various financial firms to increase profits. It also has healthcare applications, including diagnosis and treatment recommendations as well as decision support for imaging. But that's just Watson, which isn't the big name in AI right now. ChatGPT came out in 2018 and by 2021 it was available to users. Last year I signed up for it and used it a little bit for what it seemed to be good for. I tried asking it questions, mainly medical ones, and I used it a little bit to generate text to explai
The cost of health care in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world, and yet we are not healthier than our peer nations. In fact, in terms of such measures as infant mortality and life span, we don't measure up. Why is this? Many people involved in providing or receiving care have some pretty good ideas about what costs so much, and what we can do to reduce costs and improve quality. Sharing these stories is an important step in creating affordable universal health care.