2020: Enough is Enough: I’m Giving it Away for Humanity

Everything I’ve Developed on Digital Humans in Healthcare to be Given Away for Free in Public Webinar

Here is the link to the webinar registration .May 28, 2020 11:00 AM in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney

Those of you who follow me and read what I write would know that my husband has chronic heart disease and other co-morbidities and that my family also lives with disability.

For 14 years, ours has been the lived experience of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and for 20 years, disability. And now, like millions of others we are living in fear of contracting COVID-19 and what that will mean to us.

From this crucible of life emerged the world’s first AI powered digital human for service delivery “Nadia” co-created by people with disability, and the world’s first Digital Human Cardiac Coach co-designed with the cardiac community.  As you may know, my husband Allan is Digital Human Cardiac Coach patient #1 and together we created the Digital Human Cardiac Coach to help patients like him.

Cardiovascular disease and COVID-19 are both pandemics, and these two pandemics are colliding. Eighteen million people die every year from CVD, and the impact of health illiteracy on CVD outcomes is catastrophic and well documented.  

These are wicked problems. Health illiteracy and poor accessibility affect every disease and condition, not just COVID-19, not just CVDs.  Health illiteracy is widespread throughout populations, and disproportionately impacts the disadvantaged.

COVID-19 massively compounds the risks of other conditions like CVD, that an estimated 400 million people globally are suffering.  

If you have CVD, diabetes, cancers, lung diseases, disabilities and so on your future can be bleak if you contract COVID-19.

At the same time, the social isolation required by COVID-19, is closing down cardiac rehabilitation and other patient recovery and support programs around the world.

When we come out “the other side” of COVID-19, what will be the impact of these rehab services closures and restricted support look like for CVD?

Enough is enough.

I have been writing and presenting for many years now on how digital disruption in healthcare is really the 1stHumanitarian Revolution, not the 4th Industrial Revolution.

In that spirit I will be holding a webinar in the coming weeks to make what I have researched, developed, written and presented on AI digital health and digital humans a PUBLIC ASSET. 

Wicked problems won’t be solved if people lock up their good ideas for a rainy day.   

Anyone that wants to use it to help patients, and the hospital, medical and health staff who look after them will be free to do so.  

No licensing, no revenue, nothing – take it and use it.  

I don’t care if you are a philanthropic organisation, government, health insurer, hospital, tech firm – go for it.  

Help people now and into the future.  I also don’t care if you make money from it; that can only help further R&D and deployment.

I will explain in detail:

• why I came up with the concept for digital humans in healthcare in the first place.

• my proprietary co-design approach which has been documented from decades of professional and lived experience;

• how to create, deploy and operate a digital human health coach

• how to develop guided conversations, corpus Q&A, intents/synonyms and other content and I will provide what I have developed and documented to attendees

• the digital human business case including what I have developed for the USA, based on the benefits of reduced ACA readmission penalties, reduced litigation costs, increased telehealth revenue using recently released CMS telehealth codes, reduced staff burnout and increased staff retention. 

• templates and accelerators I have developed that are applied to support co-design and the creation of additional topics of conversation, for example in local areas – what do we want to “ask” the patient, and what do we want to “tell’ them

• how to balance standardisation and localisation of conversations and supporting media

• how to weave the use of media such as text, video, maps and other features into digital human conversations to overcome health illiteracy and improve accessibility

It’s great to see that people who have attended my presentations and read what I have written over the past few years, talk about these topics as part of their approach to chatbots, digital humans and so on.  

What I will do is not just talk about things like “guided conversations” but actually provide for free the guided conversations I have developed, and the methodology and templates for creating your own.

 Guided conversations are critical for effective information transference;  AI corpus Q&A only works well when patients know what questions to ask; health illiteracy ensures they don’t know! Also, corpus Q&A requires machine learning over time to improve the quality of the answers.  Guided conversations support rapid deployment.

As an example, I have developed multiple guided conversations that in the “inpatient” setting identify specific patient risks for discharge and when they return home so that these risks can be dealt with and reduce readmission penalties.  The transcripts of these guided conversations also provide proof of information transfer to reduce the risk of successful patient litigation in the future.

All of the codesign methodology I have developed, and the content including the guided conversations and templates I will provide, can be used for almost any health condition, including infectious diseases such as COVID-19.  

Of course, digital humans alone are not the complete answer to these wicked problems. 

Nadia was designed to be omni-channel and I designed the digital human cardiac coach the same way.

What I will present in the webinar is applicable across all conversational interfaces and channels not just digital humans. For example, I will talk about how my methodology and content can be applied in environments such as SecondLife.

One final note, this approach is technology neutral.

DM me on LinkedIn if you are interested in attending the webinar.

I will provide details of the webinar in the coming weeks. 

Note: I will only provide a link to the materials to those who attend the webinar.