I was pretty happy spending my days, working, teaching and trying to make a difference, one to one. But when AI and the changing technological abilities of the future met the present, I saw an opportunity to make a difference on a much bigger scale.
Working in General Practice for the last twenty years has taught me lots of things, but it has also helped me realise there are lots of things I needed to ‘unlearn’. Firstly what we say and how we say things, matters. The training and hospital initiation into the world of medicine is akin to learning a language in a new country. Not just complex medical terminology but also a way of speaking, a cadence that medical professionals use as a type of short hand to talk to each other, in a knowing way. In the world of general practice, rooted in a community, forming long-term therapeutic relationships with patients, this goes out of the window. You have to be able to communicate with people thoughtfully and in ways that fit their world not yours. It doesn’t make you clever or a better clinician to use jargon-free understandable plain English but it can make healthcare better.
At the heart of OnionAI is the ability of our Chatbot to translate from reputable sources, complex medical jargon into relevant, personal and understandable conversations that share information. Becoming literate in your health or chronic illnesses is the most important way you can take control of your life.
Control and empowering patients is the other vital factor in my decision to help create OnionAI. Patients are all too often left on the side-lines when it comes to treatment decisions about them. The days of doctors talking over the heads of patients and making decisions, without understanding the individual in front of them, must be consigned to history.
OnionAI is relentlessly user focused. We want to be in the pocket of every person, who will inevitably become a patient, to enable that person to play a full part in their medical journey. My hope is OnionAI becomes one of the first companies that can show how caring clinicians and cutting edge AI can come together to improve lives, improve user involvement in that most fundamental human right, the right to health. Technology all too often seems designed to achieve an obscure corporate agenda.
OnionAI is yours, for the user, engaging, informing and empowering everyone equally. To build a business, like that, is exciting, revolutionary and an adventure and I’m very lucky to have that opportunity with OnionAI.