The documentary “The Pitch: Patient Safety’s Next Generation” presents a picture of the United States’ hospital network as predominately archaic from a technological perspective but reveals change is beginning to arrive hopefully improving patient safety much of the change attributable based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

For example, 25% of patients admitted to hospitals in the United States contract an infection that the present system has difficulty in tracking the source of which may be minimized through AI by using each patient’s medical records and DNA sequencing to track the source and cause of those infections. The cost of hospital contracted infections in the United States costs the health care system some 28 billion USD a year.

Similarly, some 300 hospitals globally have “command centres” fueled by AI technology using the patient’s full medical records enabling them to react quickly to medical issues such as sepsis. Put another way you know that expression not playing with a full deck of cards is bound to result in poor outcomes but acting on full information contained in a patient’s medical records can be equated to playing with a full deck of cards. Imagine that AI can scour 30 years of medical records in seconds. How long would that take a human being? Patient data is valuable but how much can be reviewed by medical practitioners effectively?

The point is made by several of the physicians, academics and computer scientists featured in the documentary that AI will never replace the essential patient physician relationship but improve it as both patient and doctor are better and more quickly informed about past history and how it effects future outcomes.

There has been a huge development of virtual reality in simulation and user interaction as a training tool for both practicing physicians and medical students.

So where is all the new technology emanating from? Well, being the United States the profit motive by some is thought to be a driver for the improvement of medical care. If hospitals follow the same administrative and outmoded patient treatment practices and protocols and they still receive payment for it what is the incentive to “modernize”? It may be a cost reduction through efficiency that new technologies introduce into the system. And a good part of the documentary, perhaps too much of it, is focused on 22-year-old Reetam Ganguli the founder and CEO of Elythea who has developed software that reduces the risk to pregnant women. He pitches his products in “competitions” for cash to fund his research. Yes medicine in the United States is a business which explains the overprescribing of poorly tested pharmaceuticals. OXY is but a flagrant example. Can one rely on the Shark Tank profit motive and hedge funds to improve the United State’s medical system? Do you remember that 1970’s British band “Blind Faith”?

You can watch the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptXEj22HVhQ

The doc is available on VOD now.

The director, writer and editor of the doc is Mike Eisenberg.

RKS 2024 Film Rating; 73/100.