Potential Advancements in Patient Centricity

ACT: What are some patient-centric advancements you are looking forward to seeing in the next five years?

Keunen: The big thing today is clearly AI (artificial intelligence), right? Everybody's talking about it. There's probably too much talk, and there's a hype, obviously, like always, but it's also a real improvement. It really does help for some features. For example, what I’ve personally used AI for is to explain to me a document with information coming from a specialist doctor, and it has medical-specific terms—very hard to understand for patients, and so the AI can explain that in a simpler manner. AI can also summarize. For example, I put a whole document in for a checkup that I did one year ago, just a checkup on heart condition and there were two pages of information, and the AI summarized it by saying, “There is no problem, next checkup in one year,” which was perfect. Two sentences. It's just what I need in my case.

It can also help translate in different languages. That's important if you go abroad on vacation, or if you work abroad for some of the time. AI is clearly a big thing, and I think it will help a lot. Of course, there's all kinds of privacy questions and issues to solve, and quality issues also, all of that is important. Some things that we already know, like the mobile phone and the internet, they don't see innovations as much today, but they are pretty powerful technology for creating communities of patients to help them work together and to help the research industry. Maybe the three main things is mobile phone, internet, and AI put together—that will probably be a very interesting combination of technologies to help patients and then help providers and research also in their endeavor to help patients.