“Tom Lawry reminds us that the health care industry can shift from glacial to warp speed when it needs to. Given the right tools, we can evolve from health systems to systems of health, baked with Responsible Intelligence to do good while embedded with respect, inclusion, and transparency. Health citizens deserve Tom’s vision to emerge,”

I wrote in a quote on the back of Tom’s new book, Hacking Health Care: How AI and the Intelligence Revolution Will Reboot an Ailing System.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom knows whereof he speaks and writes and opines: he has been a health care industry leader at Microsoft for over 13 years, developed health IT, and served as an administrator in health systems earlier in his career. Oh, and his previous book, AI In Health, was a primer published just as “AI” was written into every new digital health start-up business plan seeking capital investment.

All along his work journey, Tom has had the patient’s and providers’ wellbeing at the center of his mission while driving innovation in health care.

As artificial intelligence (AI) plays a growing, integral role across all the health care industry, Tom takes a page from the book of Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI 2041, asserting that,

When we look back in (the year) 2041, we will likely see healthcare as the industry most transformed by AI.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom’s book title employs the word “Hacking” in its best sense: “It’s a term that describes a free-form way of seeing a problem and then experimenting with ways of solving something that seems insolvable,” Tom explains, quoting Drew Endy, the bioengineering prof at Stanford who said, “hacking is a positive term, and it means learning about stuff by building and trying to make things and seeing what happens.”

Hacking Health Care takes us on a plotline of the promise of AI for solving those seemingly insolvable problems in health care. We start with key lessons from the pandemic, confront the supply-side challenges we’ve already seen the start of, confess to our thorny sub-optimal solutions to the opioid crisis and mental health epidemic, and deal with the scourge of health equity that mars U.S. health care outcomes, bioethics, and moral imperatives.

Enter AI to bolster our often flawed, frail, “natural” human intelligence. Tom explains, so accessibly and with evidence, how AI and the intelligent cloud can help us address a range of big challenges in health care. Importantly and impactfully, he details how to move from aspiration to execution.

And you get a bonus: a Foreword written by Eric J. Topol, MD, of Scripps Research.

The book will inspire you to confront the difficult realities of broken health care processes, patient and provider journeys, and then embrace the possible futures: for precision medicine, quantum computing, biohacking, the health metaverse, conversational AI, and other applications that can (and hopefully will) forge a more effective, equitable, even enchanting health care future for every health citizen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom’s is my #1 book recommendation for your summer reading list when you’re not buried in the sand with this summer’s riveting spy novels, rom-com delights, and historical tomes. Let me offer a few more suggestions that are loaded on my Kindle for next week’s holiday break and digital detox…

Two more non-fictions….

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD

The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, Daniel Pink

and some fiction…

The Candy House, Jennifer Egan

Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel

Take My Hand, Dolen Perkins-Valdez (especially time in this moment)

 

 

 

 

 

Downtime and a long-overdue break beckon for me and my ever-loving mate, so this post is your week-long read until I return to the Health Populi blog on 22nd August.

Wishing you time for your own R&R break to recharge, re-boot, and relax.

And remember….love is the ultimate driver of health.