Alexandra Sifferlin

things to highlight.

And sometimes the bot can be really good at that, be really good at helping you figure out what to prioritize, what to talk to physicians about.

Some of these artificial intelligence technologies that are being developed more, they're not necessarily public facing, but they're for the medical community, but they're kind of relying on similar technology.

Physicians are really liking them and are saying, I am pretty impressed by the diagnostic capabilities of some of these tools.

And it could end up being helpful for things that are kind of on the extremes.

So maybe it's

diagnosing kind of an average cough, but maybe it's also helpful for digging through the vast data and research to try to understand something that's really rare.

There's been some initial studies about, you know, its ability to make diagnoses for more rare conditions.

So I think there's a lot of promise there if sort of the balance is figured out and people know it can't replace a physician seeing you in person.

But perhaps it can help you with your medical appointment because it can help you identify the things that you should really raise to your physician that could be helpful.

I am hopeful about the future.

I do think...

I do think that there does need to be a more widespread recognition that diagnostic error is a problem and that it is worth bringing attention to.

So, for instance, there is no current...

by which like a hospital or a medical center is incentivized to improve their diagnostic rates, their rates of getting the diagnosis wrong, or, you know, incentivized to lower diagnostic error rates, they might not track them at all.

And I think that was very interesting for me to learn in my reporting, because you have this data suggesting that most people will experience one diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with severe consequences.

And yet it's not really tracked in a sort of systematic way.

And I do think it needs to be

more considered on both the sort of systems level and individual practitioner level.

But that being said, I've been incredibly encouraged by a lot of the scientists, researchers, physicians, clinicians that I spoke to in my book who are very invested in this.