AI and aesthetics; being human and looking human The first warning came from my mother, a trained musician and lifelong lover of classical music. I played her a short piano piece I had “composed” using AI, expecting she’d appreciate the artful imitation of Bach or Mozart. She listened, admitted it was clever, but had clearly …
Two Stories, One Dilemma A 52-year-old non-smoking accountant books a comprehensive health scan. He feels well, has no symptoms, and attends mostly because a colleague recommended it. The CT scan shows a small lung nodule. It’s biopsied and turns out to be an early cancer. Surgery removes it completely. He returns to work a month …
China is running enormous experiments with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the clinical encounter. But how well do these systems actually perform? Are they safe for patients? I look for evidence and discuss what countries like SA should take from China’s rapid healthcare AI rollout. Why China is Pursuing Autonomous AI China’s drive toward autonomous AI …
Evaluating China’s push into autonomous Clinical AI Read More »
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed in March 2024, headlines focused on the enormous scale of the disaster: six lives lost, a major port paralysed and a reconstruction bill estimated at $5 billion. Behind the tragedy is a story for healthcare. Image: NTSB https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20251118.aspx Investigators have traced the initial failure on the …
The $5 billion lesson: how one loose wire brought down a bridge Read More »
Human + AI: Winning Team? In 2009, Charles Friedman articulated what he called the “Fundamental Theorem of Informatics”: a person working in partnership with an information resource is better than that same person unassisted. For decades, this has been a bedrock principle of biomedical informatics. It’s a simple idea: computers augment human capability. A calculator …
A reflection on human attention and patient safety At the October 2025 American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) meeting Dr Joyce Wahr delivered the prestigious John W. Severinghaus Lecture with a message for all of healthcare: most errors are not the result of carelessness, incompetence or insufficient effort. They are predictable outcomes of how the human …
It’s not your fault! The cognitive basis of medical error Read More »
More than 25 years after the modern “quality movement” took off, healthcare is still not as safe as we want it to be. Checklists, protocols and investigations have helped, but improvement has slowed while care has become more complex. Medical teams work in settings where conditions often shift rapidly, the margin for error is slim, …
Basketball, rugby, football and Ted Lasso: lessons from sport for safety in healthcare Read More »
Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) capture how people experience illness, treatment and day-to-day health. As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves, generative AI tools offer new ways of gathering and interpreting this information. A recent paper (Boyer et al, npj Digital Medicine. 2025) highlights both the limitations of current approaches and the possible contribution of AI. These ideas are …
Rethinking Patient-Reported Outcomes in the age of generative AI Read More »
