The seventh Salus Health Care Forum was convened on November 6, 2024. In attendance were Mitch Applegate, William Bergquist, Jerome Fish, Bill Gillanders, Perry Pugno, Scott Sandland, Mark Vukalcicc and Jack Westfall. The Trigger topic for this forum was provided by Scott Sandland who shared insights regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to augment human relationships with the goal of improving the quality of marital relationships, interactions between physician and patient–and interactions among people in general.

We offer a narrative of the presentation and comments.

Scott

My background is clinical hypnotherapy. I’ve been on treatment teams for about 25 years but not quarterbacking them. So, my job has been on staff hypnotherapist in dental offices where I specialize in bruxism and behavioral change and then that turned into pain control, which turned into opiate addiction, which turned into working with a lot of drug rehab centers, especially drug rehab centers emphasizing at-risk teens and drug addicted adolescents.

A major part of my career has been people under 30 who are in treatment or immediately post-treatment and aftercare. That is the beginning of my background. However, the more recent piece began about eight years ago, I was running a mental health clinic as the executive director with a really cool team that was working in that space. And I was just running into scaling issues.

I was running into talent issues, normal expected stuff, unmotivated or burned-out staff. I wanted to look at a scalable upstream solution to the problems that I was running into. And I wanted to get more onto the prevention side—and at scale. That led me to technology.

That guides us in the direction where this conversation might go—because I ended up getting a couple of patents awarded in AI for empathy systems. What I really saw was the sort of zigzag opportunity where everyone’s trying to make robots increasingly accurate. I was listening to AI experts at the time. They talked about what they wanted at the time. It was all about chatbots. They wanted these chatbots to be increasingly accurate and to offer specific responses. What I heard was a whole bunch of really smart people with Asperger’s talking about how to make sure all the robots act like really smart people with Asperger’s. This is not effective communication.

My brother-in-law has got Asperger’s. He’s a great guy. He’s a great uncle. And every once in a while, you just go, Uncle Nate, no one wants to hear about telescopes anymore. Like we’re fine. That’s enough. That’s all the detail we’re going to need this week.

These are wonderful, loving, good people. However, complete, thorough, accurate information is not the same thing as effective communication. If we’re talking about how to build effective communication, we need to think about what effective communication really is. There is considerable misunderstanding in this regard. AI and machine learning experts were wrong. Their misunderstanding ties directly into our conversation.