You can’t walk into any professional space without hearing the word AI. It’s no longer a sci-fi movie script or even an email writing assistant. It’s a fundamental tool for efficiency and is continuously being explored as to how we can push the functional boundaries of what AI can do for us. As its capabilities evolve, last year there were positive results from AI robots performing surgical procedures completely independent of human involvement – another giant step in the AI revolution.
AI within healthcare is topping most event agendas this year, and companies are researching brilliant ways in how AI can help address the needs of the people we all collectively serve, the patient. It can accelerate drug research and development, analyse data at lightening speed to reduce medication errors, and even provide AI diagnostic tools to help HCPs with their patient conversations. So it’s helping throughout healthcare and improving the patient experience…
“Going through a heart transplant…it’s odd, it’s a strange thing…and it’s hard, I miss my old heart. I’m so grateful, I wouldn’t be here if I had my old heart, but it’s a strange thing because you kind of think of your heart as… the centre of your emotions…so it’s a lot to go through.”
How did reading that make you feel? Surprised? Sad? Empathetic?
This is a quote from one of our A Life With… video series where we take a deeper dive in getting to know people from our patient community. The fantastic Amy who lives with HCM shared with us this unique insight, and you would have to be a robot not to feel anything when you read (or hear in her full video) about her personal experience.
If you’ve read this far (and bravo if you have), it’s likely that the words you’ll remember from this blog are those said by Amy about her condition. It’s her story that drives emotion, and it’s those emotions that compound your memory and help form your empathy for what patients go through. It humanizes her experience and connects us through a series of emotions, all of which AI simply cannot replicate. We can teach AI to simulate feelings, but they cannot express the array of emotions we humans experience whether it’s living with a condition ourselves or learning about those who do.
AI is ever learning, and its understanding of emotions and human behaviour will continue to improve as we expand its knowledge base. What it cannot learn, however, is how to feel. And that distinction matters.
For pharma, the goal isn’t simply delivering patient care (that responsibility often sits within the healthcare system). Instead, the ambition is to design medicines, services, and communications that are truly patient-centric. That means understanding the lived experience behind the condition: the uncertainty, the adjustments to daily life, the emotional weight that doesn’t show up in a clinical dataset.
AI can accelerate research, surface patterns in vast datasets, and help bring treatments to patients faster than ever before. But patient centricity requires something more human. It requires listening to real voices, understanding personal stories like Amy’s, and allowing those insights to shape how we innovate, communicate, and support the communities we serve.
The future of healthcare will undoubtedly be powered by AI, but the future of patient centricity will always begin with people.
