Direct to consumer health care
Reading: How AI Could Reshape Health Care—Rise in Direct-to-Consumer Models, Kenneth D. Mandl, JAMA, 24 February 2025.
If I had to guess, I’d suspect that if you’re ill or worried, you want to sit in a room with an actual doctor.
And at the same time:
Patients will increasingly expect from health care what they are enjoying in other industries—convenient, technology-driven solutions exploiting AI that service their needs and save them time. Reduced access to primary care and advancements in AI create momentum for change.
This JAMA viewport describes the tension, in the US, between healthcare organisations (HCOs) and direct-to-consumer companies (DTCs). That tension is just that HCOs are under heavier regulation, while DTCs may have an easier time with innovation. After all, if it doesn’t work out, a consumer company can walk away.
What’s interesting to me about this article is that it identifies the two main forces involved:
- Less primary care available (capacity doesn’t match need).
- Consumers having more control over their data (and so can share it with more organisations).
Both of those are true in the UK, too.
The article also flags the negatives of technologies. I’ve thought of them as increasing access to health information, but the article points out it can cut a digital divide around technology literacy—which reminds me of the cherry-picking reported of Babylon Health leaving a more complex case load on regular heath care providers.
I don’t know. There must be a way through this: using technology to improve access, without sacrificing accuracy, freeing up humans and machines for the trickier cases.
Related to this, it’s worth noting that medical professions are in a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation:
Learning to calibrate AI reliance is particularly challenging because physicians must navigate 2 opposing error risks: false positives (overreliance on erroneous AI guidance) and false negatives (underreliance on accurate AI recommendations).
That quote from another JAMA viewpoint, Calibrating AI Reliance—A Physician’s Superhuman Dilemma (21 March 2025).