Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel weighs in on how artificial intelligence can change the patient-doctor relationship on'America's Newsroom.' AI, ChatGPT and the like are coming for our jobs and will destroy our way of life, the doomsayers tell us. The mood is utterly different in health care, where cutting-edge physicians recognize the potential of AI to add decades to our lives and to fix the catastrophic "sick care" system, not just in the United States, but around the world. My life expectancy – and yours – is only going up, thanks to AI. Here's how and why. With the democratization of precision medicine, society will shift from a mentality that says, "I'm sick and I need treatment" to "I'm healthy and I want to stay that way." (iStock) We don't really have a health care system.

There seems to be an inherent conflict between using AI to standardize decisions compared to using it for mass customization. Efforts to develop customized care must be designed around a deep understanding of what happens at the ground level along the patient pathway and must incorporate patient engagement by focusing on such things as shared decision-making, definition of appointments, and self-management, all of which are elements of a "build-to-order" approach. When it comes to dissemination and implementation, culture eats strategy for lunch. The majority of the conversations had to do with the technical aspects and use cases for AI. A small amount was about how to get people in your organization to understand and use it. The goal is to empower clinical teams to collaborate with patient teams and that will take some work. Moving sick care to healthcare also requires changing a sprint mindset to a marathon relay race mindset with all the hazards and risks of dropped handoffs and referral and information management leaks. AI is a facilitating technology that cuts across many applications, use cases and intended uses in sick care. Some day we might be recruiting medical students, residents and other sick care workers using AI instead of those silly resumes.

While the healthcare industry becomes increasingly adept at applying clinical and claims data to improve care, it has largely ignored other data sources that provide the greatest opportunity to positively impact health and cost at scale. The dependence on this limited data set originates in the system's orientation toward "sick care" -- treating illness. To radically improve health care, we need to apply consumer demographic and lifestyle data in ways that help the health care industry shift its focus from providing sick care to partnering with people (rather than "patients") to help them stay well. The government and private sector have dedicated enormous capital and energy to building electronic health record and claims systems to automate and record sick-care transactions. This digitization supports consistent quality of care and payment accuracy, but the data is primarily retrospective – it tells a story of what has been.