Tamen Jadad-Garcia is a healthcare consultant and frequent collaborator with her father Dr. Alex Jadad, inventor of the Jadad Scale used to measure the clinical trial quality. In their 2023 book Healthy No Matter What, the pair argue for a holistic view of health that views it as not just the absence of disease, but an ability to adapt to the world around us.
In an interview with Medical Device Network, Jadad-Garcia explains what this philosophy can look like in practice. “In the book, we show how the most effective offerings are those that focus on the following approaches to help people adapt: the first is focusing on curing the curable, and the second is on managing the manageable.
“That does sound kind of obvious. But when you really lean into it and you align with it, you're able to have a bigger impact on the ability of your patients and your users to adapt.”
In the realm of healthtech, Jadad-Garcia suggests the oncology start-up N1X10 is a good example of the former focus: “They connect patients to a global network of cancer professionals powered by proprietary digital technologies and methodologies to offer precision medicine, personalised treatments and manage all the data involved in navigating the cancer journey.”
The other area of focus for Jadad-Garcia and her father is something they term ‘computational management.’ As AI becomes increasingly important across all sectors, including the world of medical devices and technology, the need for widely applicable implementation methods increases as well.
For Jadad-Garcia, computational management is one such technique: “computational management is a systematic approach to task automation that enhances the ability of organisations to harness AI’s potential within existing workflows, structured around three overarching steps. The first is called task reformulation and in this step work processes are broken down into their most basic tasks that AI can efficiently and effectively execute. […] For example, prepare marketing materials for product launch is not a task because a single person or agent couldn't prepare all of the marketing material. However, draft the website content for the new product is it meets all of those all of those criteria.
“The second step is focused on task automation evaluation. So in this step, the basic tasks that you break down in the first step are evaluated and ranked based on their automation potential. […] The third and final step is centred around filling out a task specification template, consist[ing] of 16 components.
“In the article, we offer both manual and automated methods with prompts ready to just be copied and pasted into publicly available MLMs to complete these three procedures. We focused on making it easy and straightforward so you can start your AI integration journey.”
This focus on improving access to AI reflects her broad optimism towards the technology in helping improve patient autonomy. When asked about key upcoming health trends, she told MDN: “I’m really excited about how patients will start to get empowered with multimodal medical large language models. These are capable of processing text, image, audio and video and trained on validated and up to date health information. With these, patients will be able to take more control of their care, be more aware of their situation and contribute to finding better solutions that meet their needs.
“They'll be able to be true partners in their care if that's what they want. I'm also excited by how AI will help us optimise clinical trials, [reducing] the time in which pharmaceuticals are tested and brought to market so that they can be offered to people who most need them as soon as possible. Finally, I'm really excited about how AI will be used this year to help identify new druggable targets for diseases that would have taken massive teams and years to identify.”
