To the Lighthouse: Embracing a Grand Challenge for Cancer Education in the Digital Age
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To the Lighthouse: Embracing a Grand Challenge for Cancer Education in the Digital Age David Wiljer 1,2 Published online: 8 May 2020 # American Association for Cancer Education 2020
Over the past several months, with the emergence of one of the largest and most devastating pandemics the world has ever experienced, COVID-19, health care has rapidly been transformed around the world. One of the most significant transformations has been to a wide scale adoption of virtual and digital care, work and learning. As we make the shift, we are adopting new ways of caring and learning, but we must not lose sight of fundamental values, like providing compassionate, safe, and high-quality care and education. In a recent web television series featuring a rather eccentric music conductor, Mozart in the Jungle, the conductor, Rodrigo, is asked to perform Mozart’s unfinished Requiem. Rodrigo is full of angst and anxiety about the performance. The requested version of the piece was completed by a very special composer and conductor, WAM (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), an artificial intelligence expert system that has been fed the data of every Mozart composition and recording. WAM also conducts a piece, which is done too perfectly and then an incensed Rodrigo throws WAM into a nearby stream (WAM is a computer program and so virtually unharmed). Rodrigo then conducts the Requiem but strips the piece bare of its AI perfections. While performed beautifully, the donor is disappointed that Rodrigo set humanity back in its collective pursuit of progress. How many clinicians and cancer educators can empathize with Rodrigo? The world is changing so fast around them that they are no longer practicing health care in the same way that they were trained and perhaps are now extremely uncomfortable in their new environment. Atul Gawande described the undelivered promises of the digitization of health care in the now famous piece Why Doctors Hate Their Computers, in which he states, “a system that promised to increase my mastery over my work has, instead, increased my work’s mastery * David Wiljer [email protected] 1
Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
2
UHN Digitial, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada
over me.” [1]. In the evolution of the digitization of health care, the emergence of AI in many facets of health and cancer care is raising questions about how we will work with AI to provide the best quality care to our patients. This is certainly a critical issue of our time. Will we embrace this new technology or cast it aside as Rodrigo did and seek the safety of the known, familiar and sacred? Eric Topol has demonstrated that AI has the potential to change almost every aspect of health care. He has argued that applications are quickly evolving in the entire continuum of care, from embryo selection and early detection of genetic disorders to preventive, diagnostic, and predictive care [2]. Several studies have recently demonstrated that AI systems
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