The Possibilities and Perils of Digital Health | Jag Singh, MD, PhD

It's been less than a year since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, but in that time, reports have emerged of ChatGPT outperforming physicians in everything from clinical reasoning to documentation and even to empathetic communication with patients. How are we to make sense of the role of clinicians when artificial intelligence and digital health technologies seem to be advancing at a pace beyond our reach?

Here to discuss this is Jag Singh, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Clinical Director of Cardiology and Founding Director of the Resynchronization and Advanced Cardiac Therapeutics Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the author of the 2023 book Future Care: Sensors, Artificial Intelligence and the Reinvention of Medicine.Over the course of our conversation, we discuss how digital tools can make healthcare more human-centered, how we validate the effectiveness of these tools, what we can do to prevent the profit motive from corrupting their implementation, and the skills that clinicians need to cultivate in order to thrive in the future. 

In this episode, we discuss:

2:21 - Why Dr. Singh chose the specialty of cardiology, and specifically electrophysiology 

7:43 - Why Dr. Singh became interested in digital health

10:17 - How doctors know if remote monitoring and other digital interventions  truly work in the interest of patients

15:57 - Dr. Singh’s concerns over the digitization of health

21:36 - How we can center digital health interventions on patients and what clinicians can do to be a part of the solution

34:54 - Whether or not academia is doing a good job of preparing future clinicians to work with digital tools 

37:33 - How digital tools might change the role of the clinician

43:25 - The skills that clinicians will need to develop to better work alongside AI

59:25 - The values that clinicians will need to cultivate to work effectively in the digital future of health

Dr. Singh is the author of Future Care: Sensors, Artificial Intelligence, and the Reinvention of Medicine(2023).

You can follow Dr. Singh on Twitter at @jagsinghmd.

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