Just back from the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual meeting, where we witnessed and participated in an AI-enabled, transformative merger of humans, health care, and publishing.

Here’s a hypothetical: Say you visit your GP after a fall on the ice, because of sharp pain in your side. Bruised ribs? Broken? Instead of inputting your data into a laptop as she interviews you from across the room, asking rafts of yes/no questions from an insurance form, your doctor interacts directly with you, talking in natural language rather than medical jargon, inspecting the affected area close up, eliciting from you how it feels when you breathe, when you bend over, and watching you, rather than a computer screen, as you respond to questions.

The EMR talks back, reads aloud your falls history, prescription profile, while also recording and transcribing (and aligning vocabulary between) both your and the doctor’s description of the new problem, proposed next steps, and solution for addressing pain and healing. Immediately afterwards, you both get a written report of the visit, without either of you putting pencil to paper, or stylus to screen.

You return home with familiar diagnosis paperwork and next-steps sheet from the doctor, and pharma-company-generated print-outs accompanying prescriptions, supplemented by something totally new: an online subscription to licensed medical content from reputable trade publishers, automatically searched, selected, and licensed from an EMR-connected online library, customized to you thanks to search parameters generated by your EMR! If you want to learn more about your treatment (effects of x-rays, MRIs, drug interactions and alternatives, etc.), or condition (rib contusion), just ask your EMR, then watch your bedside online library shelf fill up with content. Simple. Seamless. Sensational. Right around the corner.