Discover how AI is transforming health care by centralizing personal data and aiding in disease prevention.
SAN ANTONIO — Are you doing everything you can to improve your health and live as long as possible? In this edition of Healthy SA, we take a look at AI and how you can hop on the AI health train to potentially add years to your life in a positive way.
You may have heard —or even used — the phrase, “Be careful of Dr. Google” when looking for health information. But now, with AI, experts say accurate information is becoming easier for the average person to find, and they believe AI should be embraced, much like it already has been by medical professionals.
Brent Franson, the founder of Death Clock, told us, “AI is going to be really helpful because it’s going to allow you to centralize all of your health data in one place, and then the AI will have that single picture of your health to make you a better steward of your own health journey.”
The National Institutes of Health says AI is already being used to improve health care in many ways, including diagnosing and treating medical conditions, analyzing medical images for health concerns, connecting people with care through tools such as chatbots and ChatGPT, and using human data to help address ethical issues.
Franson says AI won’t be replacing doctors.
He told us, “AI is really good at radiology. It’s really good at reading images. And we thought, ‘Oh, this means that it doesn’t make sense to be a radiologist, that that job is going to go away.’ And actually, there’s more demand for radiologists than there’s ever been.”
AI is also being used in something called the Death Clock, but the name isn’t as foreboding as you might think.
“It’s just to be honest about the reality that we are going to die,” said Franson.
Users enter physical information, along with daily lifestyle habits and diet, to see whether changes could help improve their health and potentially prevent disease rather than reacting after it happens.
Franson added, “When and how long our lives end up being, a lot of that is really in our hands. Life is really beautiful and precious, and we want to live as long as we can.”