Three longtime patient-empowerment advocates — e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Hugo Campos, and Gilles Frydman — join Plutopia to discuss how AI is transforming participatory medicine by giving patients new tools to understand medical research, manage personal health data, challenge institutional failures, and act with greater agency. They explore the promise and risks of large language models in healthcare, including hallucinated scientific references, poor interoperability, rare-disease knowledge gaps, and the need for patient-directed AI rather than institution-controlled systems. The conversation frames AI not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a cognitive aid that can help patients, caregivers, and communities ask better questions, validate information, and regain power in a broken healthcare system.
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Gilles Frydman:
How do we find ways to help people who are not trained as scientists to get the latest scientific information so that they can get the best care in case they get diagnosed with serious stuff.
Hugo Campos:
How much agency do I have, and how much agency does AI give me? And I put AI in these two different categories that tend to be opposing in terms of agency, which are what I’ve been calling institutional AI versus patient directed AI.
Dave deBronkart:
My best talks have been entirely about the trajectory of empowerment. Not specific to healthcare, but empowerment in general through the last half century and how access to information alters that.
