Inspired by Microsoft®’s “A Father’s Quest for Diagnosis” – How a Personal Journey Led to a Disruptive AI Solution
Finding better applications for healthcare has always been my passion.
Most people see healthcare as the hospital, the insurance company (or payor, like Medicare), the providers of care, or the pharmaceutical companies—let’s call them all collectively the System. But very few actually see the patient, the individual we refer to as the Consumer.
While everyone wants to work for or sell to the System, we’ve always been focused on working for the Consumer.
Having led over 40 medical, diagnostic, laboratory, and specialty centers, worked with major insurance companies in Florida (primarily in Medicare Advantage), and having designed and overseen multiple Electronic Health Records (EHR), Medical/Financial Expert Systems, and Management Information Systems in healthcare—I’ve seen it all. And yet, I still find myself frustrated by how we process information in healthcare.
As we noted in a previous blog (see link below), the U.S. excels at the paperwork of healthcare, but lags in quality of care compared to other developed countries.
Our Family Story and the EHR Journey
My work with HealthScoreAI™ is rooted in personal frustration and experience. It all started 17 years ago when my father was hospitalized with complications from multiple medical conditions and fell into a coma. The doctors told me he wasn’t going to make it and advised me to alert the family.
But I knew my father wasn’t ready to die.
At the time, I had the incredible opportunity to lead a company with nearly 100 dedicated employees—including doctors and nurses—who shared ownership of the organization. I asked our best doctor and nurse case manager to review my father’s case. The hospital was only three miles from our office.
After signing all necessary waivers, they got to work. They convinced the hospital physicians to reduce his medications—from 13 down to 7. My father made a remarkable recovery, especially given his age and condition. He was discharged a few days later and lived another three years in his assisted living facility.
In a 2008 speech, I said then—and I still believe today—that the biggest problem in healthcare is communication. At the time, I thought widespread EHR adoption would fix it. It hasn’t. We hoped mandates and interoperability would help. They haven’t. I’m facing the same communication issues now with my other parent.
A Better Path with AI
That’s what led us to a new solution: empowering patients to help themselves and their providers by using AI and their own medical records.
Today, we have the tools, data, and opportunity—things we didn’t have 17 years ago. AI has become a more powerful resource for the consumer than for the provider (with a few exceptions: Radiology, Pathology, and Genetics).
Don’t Believe Me? Consider This:
On April 22, 2025, Microsoft® published an incredible article titled “A Father’s Quest for Diagnosis Inspired a Disruptive AI Solution.”
It tells the powerful story of Julian Isla, a Spanish father whose relentless quest to find a diagnosis for his son became the foundation for an innovative AI medical tool.
Despite visiting multiple specialists and undergoing extensive testing, Isla found that traditional diagnostics often failed. Motivated by frustration and love, he leveraged his background in data and tech to create DxGPT®, a symptom-checking AI engine built to support both patients and clinicians.
DxGPT uses large language models (LLMs) to assess symptoms and generate a list of potential diagnoses—not to replace doctors, but to augment their diagnostic process. It provides a starting point—a smart list that clinicians can refine using lab work and assessments.
What’s most impressive? DxGPT is free, doesn’t store personal data, and is built with privacy and accessibility in mind. It’s already helping families, especially those facing rare or hard-to-diagnose conditions.
A Deeper Look: AI’s Real Challenges
This story highlights the potential of AI, but also points to deeper issues.
For example, while LLMs may not store personal data, they also don’t connect easily to secure EHR systems. What happens when a patient has data across multiple EHRs? Critical information often gets lost. Even healthcare professionals make mistakes—error rates can range from 5% to 10%.
Think about it: most websites require you to confirm your password or credit card number twice for security. Why shouldn’t we demand the same precision in healthcare? The key is using live data—already inside the EHR.
The Real State of AI in Healthcare
Let’s be clear: AI is not yet ready for full, direct, and cost-effective deployment across all areas of medicine. Outside of radiology, pathology, and genetics, most clinical AI tools require significant setup, prompting, and supervision by a provider.
And doctors’ time is expensive—often valued at $10 to $30 per minute. So how much time can we realistically expect a provider to spend with AI?
Furthermore, recent studies show that even advanced models like GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, BioGPT, and others often fall short when compared to trained providers. We’ll dive deeper into those findings in our next post.
Can Privacy-Conscious AI Change the Game?
To use any LLM—including the one Isla used—you must input de-identified information. But what if we could build a private, specialized language model that runs in a secure environment, trained only on curated, medically relevant data?
That could be a game-changer for consumers.
A New Kind of Consumer at the Top of the Healthcare System
Microsoft’s story underscores the growing potential of AI to empower consumers—especially those with rare or overlapping conditions that traditional systems struggle to diagnose. AI can process medical literature and symptom patterns faster than any single doctor can.
The consumer at the top of our $5.3 trillion healthcare system will engage with providers more effectively, come to appointments better informed, and help relieve pressure on an overwhelmed system.
My own approach to healthcare is vastly different than that of my parents and grandparents—and it should be. Technology and information are finally giving patients the tools to take a more active role.
Let’s make sure we give them the right tools.
About HealthScoreAI ™
Healthcare is at a tipping point, and HealthScoreAI is positioning to revolutionize the industry by giving consumers control over their health data and unlocking its immense value. U.S. healthcare annual spending has exceeded $5 trillion with little improvement in outcomes. Despite advances, technology has failed to reduce costs or improve care. Meanwhile, 3,000 exabytes of consumer health data remain trapped in fragmented USA systems of 500 EHRs, leaving consumers and doctors without a complete picture of care.
HealthScoreAI seeks to provide a unique solution, acting as a data surrogate for consumers and offering an unbiased holistic view of their health. Giving Consumers tools to respond to denial of care by insurers, we aim to bridge gaps in healthcare access and outcomes. By monetizing de-identified data, HealthScoreAI seeks to share revenue with consumers, potentially creating a new $100 billion market value opportunity. With near-universal EHR adoption in the USA, and advances in technology, now is the perfect time to capitalize on the data available, practical use of AI and the empowering of consumers, in particular the 13,000 tech savvy baby boomers turning 65 every single day and entering the Medicare system for the first time. Our team, with deep healthcare and tech expertise, holds U.S. patents and a proven track record of scaling companies and leading them to IPO.
Noel J. Guillama-Alvarez
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nguillama/
+1-561-904-9477, Ext 355
October 24 and 27, 2024 blogs
https://oxiohealth.io/healthcare-ai-the-u-s-healthcare-model-is-broken-and-getting-worse/
https://oxiohealth.io/healthcare-ai-the-us-healthcare-model-is-broken-and-getting-worse-part-ii/