AI Are (Going to Be) Persons Too

My heart says I should write about Uvalde, but my head says, not yet; there are others more able to do that.  I’ll reserve my sorrow, my outrage, and any hopes I still have for the next election cycle. 

Instead, I’m turning to a topic that has long fascinated me: when and how are we going to recognize when artificial intelligence (AI) becomes, if not human, then a “person”?  Maybe even a doctor.

Credit: Strategic Finance Magazine

What prompted me to revisit this question was an article in Nature by Alexandra George and Toby Walsh: Artificial intelligence is breaking patent law.  Their main point is that patent law requires the inventor to be “human,” and that concept is quickly become outdated.   

It turns out that there is a test case about this issue which has been winding its way through the patent and judicial systems around the world.  In 2018, Stephen Thaler, PhD, CEO of Imagination Engines, started trying to patent some inventions “invented” by an AI system called DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience).  His legal team submitted patent applications in multiple countries.

Credit: SCC Blog

It has not gone well.  The article notes: “Patent registration offices have so far rejected the applications in the United Kingdom, United States, Europe (in both the European Patent Office and Germany), South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia…But at this point, the tide of judicial opinion is running almost entirely against recognizing AI systems as inventors for patent purposes.” 

The only “victories” have been limited.  Germany offered to issue a patent if Dr. Thaler was listed as the inventor of DABUS.  An appeals court in Australia agreed AI could be an inventor, but that decision was subsequently overturned.  That court felt that the intent of Australia’s Patent Act was to reward human ingenuity.

The problem is, of course, is that AI is only going to get more intelligent, and will increasingly “invent” more things.  Laws written to protect inventors like Eli Whitney or Thomas Edison are not going to work well in the 21^st century. The authors argue:

In the absence of clear laws setting out how to assess AI-generated inventions, patent registries and judges currently have to interpret and apply existing law as best they can. This is far from ideal. It would be better for governments to create legislation explicitly tailored to AI inventiveness.

Those aren’t the only issues that need to be reconsidered.  Professor George notes:

Even if we do accept that an AI system is the true inventor, the first big problem is ownership. How do you work out who the owner is? An owner needs to be a legal person, and an AI is not recognized as a legal person, 

Another problem with ownership when it comes to AI-conceived inventions, is even if you could transfer ownership from the AI inventor to a person: is it the original software writer of the AI? Is it a person who has bought the AI and trained it for their own purposes? Or is it the people whose copyrighted material has been fed into the AI to give it all that information?

Yet another issue is that patent law typically requires that patents be “non-obvious” to a “person skilled in the art.”  The authors point out: “But if AIs become more knowledgeable and skilled than all people in a field, it is unclear how a human patent examiner could assess whether an AI’s invention was obvious.” 

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I think of this issue particularly due to a new study, where MIT and Harvard researchers developed an AI that could recognize patients’ race by looking only at imaging.  Those researchers noted: “This finding is striking as this task is generally not understood to be possible for human experts.”  One of the co-authors told The Boston Globe: “When my graduate students showed me some of the results that were in this paper, I actually thought it must be a mistake. I honestly thought my students were crazy when they told me.”

Explaining what an AI did, or how it did it, may simply be or become beyond our ability to understand.  This is the infamous “black box” issue, which has implications not only for patents but also liability, not to mention teaching or reproducibility.  We could choose to only use the results we understand, but that seems pretty unlikely. 

Credit: Jones Day

Professors George and Walsh propose three steps for the patent problem:

• Listen and Learn: Governments and applicable agencies must undertake systematic investigations of the issues, which “must go back to basics and assess whether protecting AI-generated inventions as IP incentivizes the production of useful inventions for society, as it does for other patentable goods.”
• AI-IP Law: Tinkering with existing laws won’t suffice; we need “to design a bespoke form of IP known as a sui generis law.”
• International Treaty: “We think that an international treaty is essential for AI-generated inventions, too. It would set out uniform principles to protect AI-generated inventions in multiple jurisdictions.”  

The authors conclude: “Creating bespoke law and an international treaty will not be easy, but not creating them will be worse. AI is changing the way that science is done and inventions are made. We need fit-for-purpose IP law to ensure it serves the public good.”

It is worth noting that China, which aspires to become the world leader in AI, is moving fast on recognizing AI-related inventions. 

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Some experts posit that AI is and always will be simply a tool; we’re still in control, we can choose when and how to use it.  It’s clear that it can, indeed, be a powerful tool, with applications in almost every field, but maintaining that it will only ever just be a tool seems like wishful thinking.  We may still be at the stage when we’re supplying the datasets and the initial algorithms, and even usually understanding the results, but that stage is transitory. 

Illustration by Aga Więckowska

AI are inventors, just like AI are now artists, and soon will be doctors, lawyers, and engineers, among other professions.  We don’t have the right patent law for them to be inventors, nor do we have the right licensing or liability frameworks for them to in professions like medicine or law.  Do we think a medical AI is really going to go to medical school or be licensed/overseen by a state medical board?  How very 1910 of us!

Just because AI aren’t going to be human doesn’t mean they aren’t going to be doing things only humans once did, nor that we shouldn’t be figuring out how to treat them as persons.   

I Want to Believe

I know, I should be writing about hot topics like monkeypox or the baby formula shortage, but, c’mon, Congress held hearings last week about UFOs – the first in 50 years!  I mean, I followed Project Blue Book in the 1970’s, watched “The X-Files” in the 1990’s, and have seen UFO videos on YouTube.  If Congress is starting to take UFO’s seriously, how could I not? 

Credit: CNN

And for those of you who don’t see any possible connection to healthcare (except for those unpleasant alien probes…), let me put it to you this way: by 2050, is it more likely that:

• We’ll know what UFOs actually are;
• We’ll have fundamentally reformed the U.S. healthcare system.

I thought so.

The Congressional hearings featured Ronald Moultrie, Pentagon Undersecretary for Defense and Intelligence, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director Naval Intelligence.  Mr. Moultrie insisted, “we want to know what's out there just like you want to know what's out there,” and Mr. Bray concurred: “I’m impatient. I want immediate understanding as much as anyone else.” They testified and answered questions in both open and closed, classified sessions. 

As it turns out, there were no huge revelations.  The Pentagon has compiled some 400 reports of encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs, the term the Pentagon prefers because the objects may not be physical).  “We know that our service members have encountered unidentified aerial phenomena,” Mr. Moultrie allowed. 

There have been 11 “near misses” with U.S. military pilots, but supposedly no collisions. No firing upon (or from) them, no communication, and no wreckage.  That being said, the UAPs displayed some startling abilities, including high speeds (with no visible means of propulsion), rapid acceleration/deceleration, and hovering. The officials said they don’t believe anything points to non-terrestrial origins, but also were skeptical that foreign adversaries had the sufficiently advanced technologies to account for them.

The officials showed a video of a “spherical object” zooming past an F-18 – not easy to do! – and Mr. Bray conceded, “I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is.”

Our military aircraft take years to conceive, design, and build; they’re hugely expensive (and often overbudget); they take highly skilled people to operate them; they’re surprisingly fragile; they’re beholden to the military/industrial complex.  They’re the most sophisticated ones of their type in the world, yet these UAPs are zooming by them like a Ferrari blowing past a tractor.   

There is some concern that UAPs tend to be seen around military aircraft and bases, but, then again, the military also tends to be careful about observing and has advanced abilities for such observation.  “We do not want potential adversaries to know exactly what we see or understand,” Mr. Moultrie said coyly.

Both the officials and the legislators agreed it might be helpful if there was a central way to compile civilian reports.  We have mostly military reports because that is what has been collected, since the military has stepped up its own reporting since its June 2021 report to Congress.   Right now, though, both officials pointed out, we have “insufficient data.”  Mr. Moultrie said, “So it’s a data issue that we’re facing.”

So, maybe UAPs are, indeed, aliens.  Maybe some John Galt-type character has formed his/her/their own “men of the mind” collective to create new technologies for their own use.  Maybe they’re all really only swamp gas.  What we know is that we don’t (yet) know.

The intriguing thing to me is that they just seem way beyond our capabilities, beyond our understanding.  They mystify us.  They make our technology seem outdated.  They sometimes seem to defy the laws of physics.  Astrobiologist Hagg Misra told Science News, “Maybe they’re a sign of something like new physics.”

That, my friends, is exciting.

I like to think that UAPs were built in some teenager’s garage, using off-the-shelf materials in some novel way, piloted out by that teenager and his/her/their buddies out on a joy ride.  Whether that garage is in Des Moines or Alpha Centauri, I don’t much care. 

I love things that put us in our place, that remind us we don’t have all the answers, that open our minds to the realization that there’s a lot left to learn. I’m reminded of famed physicist Lord Kelvin, who in 1897 lamented, “there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.”  This was, mind you, right before the Theory of Relativity and quantum physics.   

Moral of the story: if you think you know how our healthcare system works and the constraints it must have, maybe you need to be open to healthcare’s UAPs – unidentified alterative possibilities. 

Mulder & Scully. Credit: Chris Carter/The X-Files

In “The X-Files,” Fox Mulder’s unspoken (but not unwritten) mantra was “I Want to Believe.”  As it turned out, there were UFOs, the aliens were among us, and there was an alien/government conspiracy.  Sometimes being the lone believer isn’t crazy.

I want to believe in a healthcare system that is radically less expensive, much more effective, and delivers on health equity.  I’m all for any new physics – or, I suspect, new biology – that helps us accomplish that healthcare system. 

I’m waiting for the pill that fixes genetic defects, the harmless beam that destroys incipient cancers, the relentless nanobots that prevent strokes and heart attacks. I want the kind of healthcare I see in science fiction. 

In today’s healthcare system, such miracles would find the pill hugely expensive, the beam’s side effects so bad that they might outweigh the benefits, and the nanobots prone to being hacked.  Instead of technology being so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur Clark put it, in healthcare we get magic that overpromises, underdelivers, and costs too much. 

Our healthcare system is a lot like those military aircraft – slow to change, incomparably costly, highly technical, reliant on skilled operators, disturbingly fragile, and deeply indebted to the healthcare/industrial complex.  I hope for a healthcare UAP to outmaneuver them like a kid on a joyride. 

I don’t want everyone to suddenly believe in UFOs, nor do I want anyone to assume that their technologies are beyond our capabilities.  I do want us to let them open our minds to the possibilities they suggest. 

Similarly, there are plenty of sightings to suggest that our healthcare system could be much better, but we’re going to need some true believers to make it so.  Are you one of them?

What Do You Mean, "Innovation"?

One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride.  Among the many great quotes is one from Inigo Montoya, who becomes frustrated when the evil Vizzini keeps using “inconceivable” to describe events that were clearly actually taking place.  “You keep using that word,” Inigo finally says.  “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Credit: iStock/MicroStockHub

So it is for most of us with the word “innovation” – especially in healthcare.

What started thinking me about this is an opinion piece by Alex Amouyel: Innovation Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does.   Ms. Amouyel is the Executive Director of Solve, an MIT initiative whose mission is “to drive innovation to solve world challenges.” It sees itself as “a marketplace for social impact innovation.”    

In her article, Ms. Amouyel notes that traditional definitions of innovation focus on the use of novelty to create wealth.  She doesn’t dispute that view, as long as “wealth” includes the less traditional “community wealth,” which includes “broadly shared economic prosperity, racial equity, and ecological sustainability.”  I suspect that innovators like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk don’t ascribe to that view of innovation.

Alex Amouyel.  Credit: Solve MIT

Ms. Amouyel’s view is: “For me, innovation is about solving problems. And if innovation is about solving problems, what problems you are solving and who is setting about solving them is key.”  She notes the multiplicity and difficulty of both global and community-level problems that we face, and urges: “Most urgently, we should zero in on problems that affect the most underserved among us.”

E.g., in healthcare, which of our many problems do we try to solve, for which populations, with whose help?  Does the innovation increase community wealth, or just some people’s wealth?  Will it improve the health of the most undeserved among us?

She is particularly keen on proximate leadership in solving problems, citing Jackson, Kania, and Montgomery: “Being a proximate leader is about much more than being exposed to or studying a group of people and its struggles to overcome adversity. It’s about actually being a part of that group or being meaningfully guided by that group’s input, ideas, agendas, and assets.”

Therein lies the problem.  Whether it is global warming, poverty, or the dysfunctional U.S. healthcare system:

The issue today is that, too often, we’re not recognizing and thus not investing in proximate innovators working in underserved communities, meaning their innovations may never quite reach the depth and scale needed for systemic change.

Those searching for innovation — investors, corporations, foundations, corporations, or governments — rely on top-down or closed approaches to find innovators. This relies on innovators being part of existing networks in particular geographies, going to the right schools, or being introduced through the right person to an investor or a foundation program officer. We need to fling open both literal and figurative doors to meet proximate innovators where they are, adopting bottom-up and co-creation approaches that allow access to those working in and with the most underserved communities.

I can’t speak to how well that applies to other major problems, but I sure recognize that as a problem in healthcare, particularly in the U.S. We’ve seen a flurry of digital health “innovations,” which, as best I can tell, mostly focus on making things a little easier for middle/upper class people with moderate health issues.  Not exactly getting at the core of the biggest health problems our nation faces, nor the biggest problems in our healthcare system.  Not really flinging open the doors to the thousands, maybe millions, of proximate innovators whose very lives are at stake. 

E.g., if you are a hospital and front-line nurses aren’t helping lead your innovation efforts, you’re probably focusing on the wrong things.  If you are a digital health company, a pharmaceutical company, or a medical device company, and patients play at best an advisory role, admit it – you’re really just in it for the money.   

Solve, for example, puts together Challenges that recruit “social entrepreneurs who are using technology to solve today’s most pressing problems.”  It has supported some 228 Solver teams over the years, including one focused on The Care Economy and another on Equitable Health Systems.  Current open challenges include how to measure performance improvement in primary care and another on improving the quality of lives for people with rare diseases.

Solve just held Solve at MIT 2022.  Two quotes from the summary jumped out at me:

• Azra Akšamija: “When we work with fragile communities we always have the best intentions, but best intentions don't always make the best solutions.”
• Hanna Hala: “Charity asks: what’s wrong, how can I help? Justice asks: why is it happening, how can I change it?”

Look, I’ve long been an advocate of electronic health records. I’m all in favor of more digital health solutions.  I’m thankful for the kind of drug development advances that made finding and producing the COVID-19 vaccines so quick.  I’ve been the beneficiary of improvements on surgical techniques and devices.  I’m fascinated by AI, 3D printing, VR/AR/metaverse, and robotics in healthcare.  All those, and more, count as “innovation” as we typically define it in healthcare, but I have to ask: are they the best solutions for fragile communities?  Do they help bring more justice in our healthcare and in our society? 

I didn’t think so either.

If we’re going to be true innovators in health, we’d need to start by realizing we’re spending our $4 trillion quite stupidly, with much of the innovation going to make the people and organizations who are already rich even richer.  We’d focus on the fact that most of our health issues start from too much poverty, with too many people lacking adequate income, housing, food, and education.  We’d be mad that the people who deliver hands-on care, including nurses, nursing home workers, and home care aids, get paid so little relative to their immense contributions. 

Address those kinds of things, take on those kinds of challenges, then you can call yourself an innovator.  Until then, I’d have to agree with Ms. Amouyel: innovation doesn’t mean what you think it means. 

The Licensing Walls Come Tumbling Down

Abortion rights continue to be one of the most heated issues in American politics, super-fueled by last week’s leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade and return the issue to the states to decide. 

Credit: iStock/Lily illuatration

I’ll leave it to others more qualified than me – women, for example -- to weigh in on abortion itself, but I want to talk about how abortion pills are going to force changes to our healthcare system that many may not be ready for.

Although the stereotype of abortions is a procedure done by a physician in an office/clinic, the majority of abortions in the U.S. are now done through the use of abortion pills.  It is a two step process, and the two medications must be prescribed by a physician.  Until last December, women were required to see a physician in person, but the FDA permanently lifted those requirements, following a temporary waiver during the pandemic.  The pills are considered both highly effective and safe.  There are startups, like Hey Jane and Just the Pill, that specialize in them.

Not surprisingly, since the leak searches for “abortion pills” have hit all-time highs.

The states that have been passing various abortion bans have not ignored the loophole that abortion pills represent.  There are a variety of restrictions that have been enacted, such as requiring in-person visits to outright banning use of telehealth for them.  In those states, some women have opted to travel out of state to do the telehealth visit and/or to receive the pills via the mail. 

Credit: Reuters

“Medication abortion will be where access to abortion is decided,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at Florida State University College of Law who specializes in reproductive rights, told AP. “That’s going to be the battleground that decides how enforceable abortion bans are.”

The thing is, it’s awfully hard to successfully control with whom someone can do a telehealth visit or what they can receive in the mail.  “This is just not going to be stoppable,” Gerald Rosenberg, a law professor emeritus at the University of Chicago law school, told The Washington Post.

Since its inception, telehealth has played along with the states’ contention that its physicians must be licensed in the state where the patient lives.  That has led to many physicians being licensed in multiple states – sometimes dozens.  That, obviously, is both time-consuming and expensive.  But should licensing be based on where the patient happens to be, or where the physician practices?

E.g., one patient sees a physician in person, another via a screen.  Both have the same issue (let’s say it is abortion), and both get the same advice/prescription.  The physician is doing exactly the same thing from exactly the same place.  How does the presence or absence of a screen change who should be licensing that physician? 

It’s even worse when the laws in one state don’t follow standard medical practices.  Abortion isn’t a medically inappropriate procedure/prescription despite what a state legislature might try to dictate.  If a state wants to try to extradite a physician because he/she violated its abortion laws, while still acting within the bounds of his/her own state’s license, would the latter state have any obligation to go along?  Or, if, say, the Texas Medical Board asked the New York Medical Board to discipline a physician for prescribing abortion pills, does anyone think New York would go along?   

To complicate things even further, it isn’t just U.S. physicians to consider.  People have been getting prescriptions from overseas sources for years (Viagra, anyone?).  While technically illegal, the FDA isn’t rushing to stop such importation as long as it is for personal use (and the imports are of good quality).  Abortion pills are the next frontier.

Aid Access, for example, was founded in 2018 specifically for to serve U.S. women (a sister organization, Women on Web, has been similarly serving women in other countries since 2005).  The organization is based in Austria and run by Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts.  It can direct prescriptions to U.S. pharmacies, or, if that is problematic, to overseas ones, such as in India (which has high quality genetics).

“There's been an overwhelming amount of people that reached out to us," Dt. Gomperts told CBS News last week. "I think that's a really good response. So I would say, buckle up, women in the U.S. Just get your abortion pills in your medicine cabinet, so you have it in case you need it.” 

“What I’m doing is legal, under the laws where I work from,” she emphasized to CNN. “I actually have a medical oath to do this.  I’m a doctor, my oath is that I help people that are in need, and that is what I am doing.”

Christie Petrie, a U.S. midwife who works with Aid Access to help fill prescriptions, told Vox:  

We’re pretty nonplussed, to be honest. I don’t see a route [to stopping us]. It’s not to say that it’s impossible, I just don’t see a route for politicians to eliminate access to Aid Access; they just don’t have the jurisdiction to criminalize an international doctor.

I don’t see it either.

Abortion pills may be the next frontier, but they are not the last frontier.  We live in a connected world.  There are licensed, highly competent physicians all over the world.  There are supplies of prescriptions drugs, as well as medical supplies and devices, outside the U.S. If states want to restrict medical practice, some people aren’t going to accept those restrictions – and they’ll find physicians who agree.  Finding ways to counteract local restrictions on medical practice didn’t start with abortion pills and won’t end with them.

State licensing made sense in a world where care was local, when physicians always saw their patients in person.  We no longer live in that world.  That world is over, especially when legislatures – not physicians -- are trying to tell physicians and other healthcare professionals how to practice.  It’s archaic, inefficient, and increasingly ineffective.

And just wait until we get A.I. doctors, who aren’t “located” anywhere in particular. 

The walls that states have built around medical practice are falling, and they’re not going to get back up.

Learning From This War

There’s an old military adage that generals are always fighting the last war.  It’s not that they haven’t learned any lessons, it’s more than they learned the wrong lessons.  I fear we’re doing that with the COVID pandemic. 

Credit: BaronVonGames

The next big health crisis may not come from another COVID variant; it may not be caused by coronavirus at all.  Even if we learn lessons from this pandemic, those may not be lessons that will apply to the next big health crisis. 

What started me thinking about this is a C4ISRNET interview with Mike Brown, the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit, and DARPA Director Dr. Stefanie Tompkins.  Dr. Tompkins and Mr. Brown are both watching the war in the Ukraine closely.  As Dr. Tompkins says in the interview, the war is a “really good test” about the programs her agency has invested in and/or is investing in for the future.

Darpa helped develop the Javelin. Credit: Reuters

E.g., Russia has clear advantages in numerical superiority, and in “traditional” weapons like tanks, airplanes, ships, and artillery, but Ukraine has been able to blunt the invasion through asymmetrical warfare, using things that DARPA helped foster, including Javelin missiles, drones, satellite imagery, secure communications, and GPS.  Even Russia’s vaunted cyber capabilities have been overmatched by Ukraine’s own capabilities.  Current DARPA investments like hypersonic missiles and AI are being tested.

I’m comforted that DARPA and DIU are learning in real time what lessons their agencies can learn to help fight future wars, but I’m wondering who in our healthcare system, and who in our governments (federal/state/local), are not just fighting COVID but learning the bigger lessons from it to fight future crises. 

I trust that smarter people than me are looking at this, but here are some the lessons I hope we’ve learned:

Information: it’s shocking, but we don’t really know how many people have had COVID.  We don’t really know how many have it now.  We like to think we know how many have been hospitalized and how many have died, but due to reporting inconsistencies those numbers are, at best, approximations.  

We need early warning systems, like through wastewater monitoring.  We need standardized public health reporting, with real-time data and a central repository in which it can be analyzed.  We need easy-to-understand dashboards that both public officials and the public can access and base their decisions on.  We can’t be building these during a health crisis.

Supply Chains: just-in-time, globally distributed supply chains are a marvel of modern life, bringing us greater variety of products at more affordable prices, but, in retrospect, we should have understood that in a global health crisis they would prove to be an Achilles heel.  Masks and other PPE, ventilators, vaccines and other prescription drugs have all suffered from supply chain issues during the pandemic.  Shortages led to unevenly distributed supplies and higher prices. 

We’re never going back to the days of local production, but we do need to prioritize what things need to be produced regionally/nationally, how that production can scale in time of crisis, and how that production should be fairly allocated.  The mechanisms to do that can’t be built on the fly.

The sick and the dead: Among the many images of the pandemic’s worst (so far) days, some of the most haunting are the ones of hospitals filled to overflowing, with patients on gurneys in hallways, or the refrigerator trucks filled with dead bodies.  Our healthcare system’s capabilities for both were simply overwhelmed – as was the healthcare workforce.

Hospital beds are expensive to build, and expensive to maintain.  We can’t afford a healthcare system that builds them for the worst case scenario.  But we can learn from innovative efforts during the pandemic, like building temporary hospitals that can be expanded or contracted as needed. 

Similarly, there has to be a strategy for dealing with dead bodies during a global health crisis, especially one in which those bodies themselves may carry ongoing risks.  Existing morgues, mortuaries, and even graveyards may not be sufficient.  There needs to be a plan.

Credit: Shutterstock

Hardest to solve are healthcare workforce shortages.  It’s not easy to train new healthcare workers, and retaining them when they’re stressed beyond belief proved to be a challenge.  In a crisis, we need them all working at the top of the licenses, able to cross workplaces and even state lines, and properly supplied and compensated.  None of those is a “normal” state of affairs for our healthcare system, and all are inexcusable in a crisis.

Telehealth: telehealth seemed to finally gets its day during the pandemic, with relaxed regulation, improved reimbursement, provider adoption, and consumer preference.  It took pandemic to make us realize that making sick, potentially contagious, patients travel to get care is not a good idea.

That being said, now that the pandemic is in a more manageable phase, the bloom seems to be off the telehealth rose, with regulations being reapplied, providers not fully incorporating into their practice patterns, and patients returning to in-person visits.

Hey: it’s 2022.  We have the technology to do telehealth “right.”  Aside from, say, a heart attack or an auto accident, telehealth should always our first course of action.  Our licensing, our reimbursements, and our work flows need to facilitate this – not just to prepare for the next health crisis, but simply as part of a 21^st century healthcare system.

Communication: One of the most unexpected results of the pandemic is the distrust of public heath advice – vilifying public health officials, spurning mitigation efforts like masking or isolation, and spurring on the already-present anti-vaxx movement.  “Science” is seen as in the eye of the beholder. It’s an information war, and health is losing.

We need the tools to fight the health information war more effectively. We need to learn how to communicate more effectively.  We need to reestablish faith in science.  We need responses to a health care crisis to be a health issue, not a political one.  

How to fight misinformation? Credit: CDC

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We will be taken by surprise by the next health crisis.  We had plans for a pandemic, but, when it hit, we fumbled every response.  Next time we’ll be expecting another COVID, and, if it’s not, we’ll be caught flat-footed again. 

The current crisis is, to use Dr. Tompkins’ words, a really good test for whether we’re working on the right things for our next health crisis.  I’m not so sure we are.