Care in the future
Scaling technology to spread better decisions, if it is designed well.
The final chapter imagines how AI, wearables and sensors could spread better decision-making, provided the tools are built with metacognition in mind. It organises the future around five themes: matching each decision to the right support, a two-way learning health system where clinicians and machines learn from each other, health records that treat the patient as a co-author, a broader idea of what research counts and protecting genuine patient choice. Proposals include capturing the reasoning behind a decision as it happens, an always-on coaching avatar that works like a living logbook, federated learning across hospitals and patients setting their own appetite for risk and human contact. It warns against importing the misaligned incentives of social media.
Three takeaways
- Decision support can harm if it is used at the wrong moment
- Patients should help write their record, not just read it
- Everyday care data may come to rival big randomised drug trials
Reflection
Questions for this chapter
Prompts to consider on your own, in a journal club or in a teaching session. All questions are optional, so you can read them without submitting anything. If you choose to submit answers, they are collected through Google Forms.