Healthcare leaders know the pattern. Warning signs appear. Evidence accumulates. Institutions hesitate. And by the time action is taken, the cost, human and financial, is already enormous. Right now, that pattern is playing out across AI deployment, eroding public trust, and simultaneously weakening fragile health systems.
In this episode of Digital Health Talks, physician-scientist and biostatistician Dr. Barry R. Davis brings a framework health leaders can actually use. Drawing on decades leading landmark prevention trials and his new book The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and the Discoveries That Changed Our World (Johns Hopkins University Press, May 2026), Dr. Davis breaks down why evidence alone rarely drives action, what trust has to do with it, and what the leaders who successfully broke the cycle actually did differently.
If you are responsible for AI governance, patient trust, or building a prevention-first culture inside your health system, this conversation is for you.
Dr. Barry Davis, Professor Emeritus, UTHealth
Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live
00:00:00 Intro: Welcome to Digital Health talks. Each week we meet with healthcare leaders making an immeasurable difference in equity, access and quality. Hear about what tech is worth investing in and what isn't as we focus on the innovations that deliver. Join Megan Antonelli, Jenny Sharp, and Shahid Shah for a weekly no BS deep dive on what's really making an impact in healthcare.
00:00:30 Megan Antonelli: Healthcare runs on evidence. So why do we keep arriving late to every preventable crisis? We build the most risk averse systems in the world, and somehow still manage to be surprised by every crisis. This is a pattern that shows up across every major public health failure in history. Warning, delay, crisis and reform. And right now, it's playing out again inside the health care systems that we run all, all around AI, around trust and around the tools we've been betting the future of Karen. My guest today has spent his career studying exactly that pattern. He was the principal investigator of Allhat, the largest hypertension treatment trial ever conducted. Work that changed how hundreds of millions of people are treated for high blood pressure worldwide. He's advised the FDA chaired more than one hundred and fifty data monitoring committees and published over three hundred and fifty peer reviewed studies. And his new book, The Prevention Errors, he makes the case that what's happening with AI now is not unprecedented. It's a pattern. And history tells us exactly how it ends if we don't act. This is Megan Antonelli, CEO of Health Impact Live, and this is Digital Health Talks. And I'm here today with Doctor Barry Davis. Doctor Davis welcome to the show.
00:01:45 Dr. Barry Davis: Well thank you Megan and glad to be here.
00:01:47 Megan Antonelli: Well it's just so exciting to meet you. Reading the book and looking at the work you've done your work in clinical trials advising the FDA. Let's step back a little bit. Tell our audience about your background and kind of how you got to, to write your new book.
00:02:03 Dr. Barry Davis: Sure. My background started, uh, in medicine and then it moved to mathematics and statistics because I became very interested in that. And as a little aside, I should say that when I was in graduate school, I was at the very beginning of artificial intelligence. My thesis was called the Neurobiological Basis for Machine Intelligence. And I worked under several well-known people from Brown University, Stuart Goodman, James Anderson, and even met Geoff Hinton a couple of times. But those were the days. And I tried to do something with it, but we didn't have the computing power that we have now. So it just it's incredible. Right. But I so I went into statistics and I drifted towards clinical trials when I came to Houston and became very involved in hypertension, clinical trials and other kinds of prevention, clinical trials, diabetes, cholesterol, and so on. But over the years, I've noticed things that people just sort of fail to move on when evidence becomes accumulated and they fail to act on it. They want more and more evidence. So I decided that let me go back to the origins of all this, and that's how I started the book. I started with Ben Franklin because he's well known for his phrase, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And most people don't know this. But he was not talking about disease prevention. He was talking about fire prevention. And that amazed me. But in looking at his early life, he was exposed to fires all the time. And he came up with these ideas. Most of them were not his ideas. They were borrowed, but they. He was able to get them across because he had an incredible platform. He was a publisher and he could just publish whatever he wanted. And he had this thing called the Pennsylvania Gazette, and he published in there and pushed for this. But of course, he became well known in other areas after that. There's one little aside about it is that he, um he became a fireman. He organized the Union Fire Company in Philadelphia, and he joined it along with many others.
00:04:28 Megan Antonelli: Wow. I didn't know that. And that's, I think what's so interesting about all of this and about your book and like it's called the full title is the Prevention Years diseases, disasters and the discoveries. And you, you look at, um, various individuals who have kind of approached this and the stories around that. And, and I think you, you uncover this sort of recurring sequence of, you know, sort of warning, uncertainty, resistance, delay, crisis reform. And, and I think that there's it's not obviously it's very applicable to disease. We've all come out of what feels relatively recent in terms of the pandemic and Covid. And certainly there was there was warnings and, and times and sort of disease preparedness that we all went through. But yet there was many reasons to which that ended up a disaster. And many of that having to do with trust. So tell us a little bit about the sequence that you've identified and how it runs, not just through public health, but through some other areas as well.
00:05:28 Dr. Barry Davis: Well, the sequence is usually the the following recognition. You have to see that there's some sort of preventable harm. You have to gather evidence to show it and to hopefully find a way to stop it. And then you have to translate that into into a way to deal with it. And then finally, the end of the sequence is that you have to find a way to implement it and implement it on scale so that it just doesn't become. It has to become part of the institution. It has to be put into law or become a scientific guideline or become part of the culture. And I give many examples in the book of this, but and why it's called the engineers is because these were prevention pioneers. And I just sort of abbreviated those two words. But these people, um, face many travails in their lives. They all have seen this problem wherever they worked or where they lived. In the case of Franklin, it was where he lived in the case of I talked about this doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis in Vienna. It was because of where he worked. He worked in a hospital. He was an obstetrician. But they all happened to deal with the problems where they came along, and they saw that there was a problem. They realized that something should be done about it. They found ways to gather evidence, and one way or another, they tried to call attention to how to solve this. Some were very successful, others not so successful. And along the way, many of them met this. One thing that comes up with prevention is resistance. It can be resistance from institutions, um, from the culture, from the present understanding of the way things are. And people don't want to change the status quo. It can come in many forms and some of them were able to overcome it, come it and some of them were not. So.
00:07:32 Megan Antonelli: I mean, it is really interesting. And I think that evidence sort of and that pathway to kind of resistance is what I think is so interesting. Right. And, and even seemingly sometimes when we talk about hypertension or health and things that quitting smoking, it's hard, right? But sometimes, sometimes things that are easy, they're still resistance to. Right. It's not, um, getting a vaccine. There's not, there's, it's not that hard. But yet that lack of trust leads to resistance.
00:08:05 Dr. Barry Davis: With the prevention is that if it really works really well, people forget in the case of vaccines, for some of these things, it works so well that the problem was eliminated. So then people say, well, why should I get a vaccine? There's nothing like this now. And it comes back.
00:08:24 Megan Antonelli: Right. And talk a little bit. I know you worked on the the Allhat study. Tell us a little bit our audience that might not be familiar with it, tell us a little bit about that and kind of how that story has informed the book and your theory behind this.
00:08:40 Dr. Barry Davis: Yes. Well, Allhat was a huge hypertension trial with over forty thousand patients, and it was designed to see among four different classes of blood pressure medications, which one might be best at preventing heart attacks, and subsequently strokes and heart failure and other things that hypertension leads to. And there are many things that occur during the trial which just amaze me. One thing that occurred early in the trial was there was increasing evidence that one of the drugs was more harmful than the others in terms of something. And it took a while and we saw it and we saw it, and we didn't want to jump on it, but we wanted to do something about it. It was real. And eventually we did. We had to convince others, but we dropped one of the arms. The alpha blocker arm drug called Doxazosin was in it because it was compared to the other drugs. It had many more cardiovascular events, specifically heart failure. So that changed the practice of medicine a bit because that was a first line drug for hypertension. And after that it was not a first line drug anymore. But then at the end, we found that the drugs were mainly equivalent in terms of what they could do. And we sort of recommend that it might be better to at least try the cheaper drug because be available to more people. But there was resistance from that from the pharmaceutical industry because they had these more expensive drugs. So it was a journey along the way. In fact, one of the things we did at the end of the study was we had this thing, I talked about translation and implementation, but we realized that the results of the study and what it meant, we're not going to get out just by publishing papers. We needed to go out in the field and tell people about it. So we we came up with solutions for that.
00:10:29 Megan Antonelli: Yeah, I mean, it is interesting, and we've talked to a lot of folks in public health and sort of the communication side of things. And you are dealing with, obviously the patients, the individuals making choices, physicians, clinicians, prescribing practices, I mean, changing behavior in healthcare is it's an all hands on task. And. And for many of these problems of public health, public health has found itself really with its hands tied, unable to change behavior effectively. And I think to some of the campaigns that we we recognize that have worked, certainly seatbelts and, um, sort of the, the brain on drugs, the frying pan.
00:11:15 Dr. Barry Davis: You remember those things? Yes.
00:11:17 Megan Antonelli: Very visual, very visual programs, communication strategies that that create an emotional responses to get people to change.
00:11:25 Dr. Barry Davis: But I was going to say that's an excellent point that you made. I talk about that a little bit in the book about having emotional ties to this stuff. Somehow you can do that. It makes it easier to convince people.
00:11:38 Megan Antonelli: Right? And then, I mean, in some ways, I guess it is that almost why we end up responding to a crisis, right? And then having things mandated. And sometimes that makes people even less happy with the health care and the public health system. But I, when I was reading the book and kind of understanding where you're coming from with this, I find it because we also because we talk a lot about technology and we talk about the sort of health care, being risk averse as a system, right? We try not to adopt things too fast or move too quickly because lives are on the line. And at the same time, when, when given perfectly preventable sort of scenarios that the evidence is saying, do this, this is how this is how we take care of this or change this. Yet we don't necessarily change protocols fast enough, nor do patients and the population respond quickly enough. So what's your what's your take on that in terms of contradiction?
00:12:41 Dr. Barry Davis: I had a term for that which I've called like delayed certainty is that you keep on wanting to gather more evidence. Well, we don't know quite yet. Maybe we should do another study. Maybe we should do this. Maybe we should do that. And there comes a point when you realize something bad is happening. There's harm being done, and we can't keep doing this. We have to take action. The classic example in the book of that is the tobacco industry and smoking. I mean, what happened in the fifties is that there was beginning evidence to show that tobacco and smoking was related to lung cancer, at least. And then the evidence kept piling up, piling up. And then in the sixties, we had the Surgeon General's report. And by that time you would have thought that it was all there. But no, it kept on going and going because there was a lot of resistance from the tobacco industry, tremendous amount of resistance. Right. And it did. It still is with us. It wasn't until sort of the the suits, the Tobacco industry in the late nineteen nineties and two thousand. That really sort of moved the needle a lot. But I don't know, ten, twelve percent of the population still smokes, right?
00:13:54 Megan Antonelli: Yeah. No, I mean, it it is it's sort of fascinating. And I think tobacco is a great example of it. And, and the factors that are at play, right, where you have a considerable amount of evidence that speaks to the public health side of it. And then you have the economic incentives of of those that are sort of aligned with the sales of the product. But then on the flip side, you have something like vaccines where we've got the public health evidence. I mean, I know they're not the biggest line of business for pharmaceuticals. In fact, they often lose more money. Right. Lose more money on the research than they make. But at the same time, they're not losing that much. They still would like people to take their vaccines. So where, where? But yet we don't have there's failures of trust. And I know you had a recent op ed around the social media element of, you know, this there's a whole communication sort of education piece that is that the health care systems, to some degree, need to combat to, to kind of get the public health message out there to combat that social media piece. But yet we've continued to allow it, and I think so. And social media being a threat, both on proper education of health care, but then also in and of itself, a mental health threat for people, certainly teenagers and all of that. So I and I've talked we've talked a lot about trust lately and, and that will bring us to what we're going to talk about in a minute in terms of artificial intelligence and the trust of the health care system. But I'd love in terms of what what can we do? Or whether trust is that the be all, end all to what what drives is that the prevention?
00:15:37 Dr. Barry Davis: It's not the be all, end all. It's a very important component of it. You have to have trust in people that are trying to communicate to you. I know during the Covid pandemic, there was a lot, a lot of loss of trust, and it was trying to communicate that you need to trust people who are close to you, whether it's your own doctor or your own minister or somebody else in the community that you trust. And if those are the people that were speaking out and trying to convince you that it was worthwhile to do something, you would listen to them. But to think back to like the social media problem, one of the problems with a lot of the issues in prevention is that we always try to leave it up to the individual. Oh, put down your phone or don't go on the social media. Well, it's hard to do. It's the same thing as it was with smoking. Well just stop. People couldn't stop. They were addicted to it. Right. And some of them, a lot of them said, well, I like it, so why should I quit? See, you have to convince them. But. So something needs to be done in the system, at a system level and environmental level to make it easier for people to do things. Make it less friction. Mhm. And, uh, that's the things that can go from translation to implementation.
00:16:53 Megan Antonelli: Right? And if you, I mean, you think about smoking, the reality is, is that we did sort of mandate it and eliminate it from public places and public spaces and made it much harder for people to do much the same way that we do mandate vaccines for, for school aged children and, and things like that. So we've had to kind of mandate prevention across the board, even though the body of evidence is so, so huge. Right?
00:17:21 Dr. Barry Davis: Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the case with, uh, with smoking, you know, we went from one item to another to another to another to another, trying to layer all this in so that it would make it harder and harder, including, you know, raising the price of cigarettes all the time so that people could think, well, is this really cost effective for me to keep doing this? The thing with vaccines, as I said at the very beginning, the part of the problem was that it was so successful that the problem sort of became invisible. What's the problem? Well, there's a blanket of protection there, and if you lessen that blanket, the cases will start to come back and rise. And that is exactly what happened.
00:18:04 Megan Antonelli: Right? Yeah. No, I think it's really interesting. We've talked a bit about around here in terms of longevity being the rebrand for prevention, and that it's sort of this sexy term that people are very into right now. And any anti-aging, even Eric Topol writing his book, sort of framed on anti-aging. But in reality, once you open that, it was just sort of a recipe for prevention. And there's lots of books out there. And I think yours is more in some ways kind of a. What I like about it is it looks at the history of, of, of this, of what it's really entrenched in our behavior and, and our systems to, to, to almost not follow the data and to go, to go the other way.
00:18:47 Break: You're listening to digital health talks. When we return, we'll continue our discussion on how technology is revolutionizing healthcare delivery. Stay with us to hear more insights on creating sustainable, patient centered digital health solutions.
00:19:06 Dr. Barry Davis: The reason I wrote it like that was because I was going to write a book about with a lot of facts and figures and all that, and I figured, well, nobody's going to read that. So you write a book with a lot of stories in it makes it much more interesting. People say, look what happened there, and look what happened there, and so on and so on.
00:19:26 Megan Antonelli: Yeah. And I know you wrote it sort of with public health in mind, but recently, in terms of the, the technology side of things and where conversations are with AI sort of broadly and, and on kind of an implementation level at health systems, I think we talk a lot about AI governance and what there could be what, what warning signs there might be, and what we need to do to make sure we don't, you know, follow the same paths and make make the same mistakes. I know you also another op ed on the recent documentary, the AI doc or how I Became an Optimist. Another, another fun, uh, mash up of two words, right? I don't, I like them both. Um, and I think I feel like I want to be both. Um, but the, um, in terms of sort of where we stand in that, how you can apply the framework of the prevention areas to, to AI, what would you tell kind of health system leaders as they look at the promise and the perils of artificial Intelligence for healthcare.
00:20:33 Dr. Barry Davis: Well, sure, the promise is immense. I mean, I don't think even we can imagine what the promise is. It can do so much good. But like with every new technology, there's good and bad, and you have to build into the system lots of checks. So you have to build some sort of governance to know whether the things you're seeing were AI generated or not, whether these things, these so-called hallucinations that they're cropping up. And how do you try and minimize that? How do you get rid of that? The people should not necessarily accept everything right away. They should push back. Push back. I mean, I use AI quite a bit and I always push back, push back, push back. It just amazes me when I push back, it says, yeah, you're right. So it said it's it's not. It's amazing what it can do, but it's not right all the time. Right. And we have to put guardrails in. We can't have it handle everything. There has to be some human input along the way and it should not replace humans, but help humans.
00:21:39 Megan Antonelli: Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think it's interesting, I mean, in, in so much as the evidence is showing, we're seeing places where maybe this happens across all technology implementation, anything with adoption where, you know, and I mean, even to use the vaccine example, there are negative consequences sometimes. And so when the good outweighs the bad, you still want to move forward, but you have to do it cautiously and be aware of, of, of the risks. And it is, it's no, no easy thing to be a pioneer on prevention and or innovation and technology, but it is important to listen to the signals and the data. I mean, you mentioned Semmelweis and, and the, you know, sort of your coverage of that in the book. Tell us a little bit more about his story and what, what, what that could teach leaders today who are trying to kind of bring, bring change about.
00:22:32 Dr. Barry Davis: Oh, it was an interesting story and a tragic story because here was a young, uh, obstetrician who started off in a great hospital. Vienna General Hospital is known worldwide. And immediately when he got there, he saw there was a problem in that there were two clinics. One clinic had was manned by physicians, and the other was manned by midwives. And in the clinic that the physicians were the. The death rate from childbed fever was high. And in the other clinic, not so. Women would come to the hospital sometimes, and they would beg to not be put in the doctor's clinic. They want them to be in the midwives clinic. And they. The hospital tried to figure it out, but they. They couldn't. But they kept great data. He was able to plot it on a graph and so on. But then he realized that he needed to investigate it. He couldn't just accept the problem, he needed to find out why. And he came up with these big, long series of questions, one after another after another, which he rejected. He said this couldn't be the reason. This couldn't be the reason. This couldn't be the reason. And it was only after he went on vacation and came back that one of his colleagues friends had died, and he looked at the autopsy results, that he had an epiphany. He came up with the reason, uh, there was something being transmitted in their systems from autopsies, because this doctor had been in the autopsy room and something had pricked his finger or his hand or something. And then he developed all these problems, which were similar to what women in childbed fever had. And he realized that the doctors in that clinic would go to autopsies of the women, and other people would finish the autopsies, would either wipe their hands on a towel or maybe use some soap and water, and then go back and examine the women. They had no gloves in those days. So he realized that they were transmitting something, and he called it cadaverous particles. And he realized the best thing to prevent that would be to at least get rid of the smell on your hands. And he came up with this chlorinated water solution and instituted that convinced the hospital that it should. And it worked dramatically. But he met resistance. He met dramatic resistance because that was not the theory of the day. Germ theory had not existed then. And the theory of the day was that this was what was called miasma. There was something in the air that was causing this, and he had looked at that on his list of questions. He says that couldn't be possible because there was something in the air. How could it just be in one clinic and not the other? The clinics were right next to each other, and then he was a young obstetrician, but he was also from Hungary. He was not Austrian. He was not from Vienna. He was an outsider. He was a junior academic. Why should we listen to you? Why are you telling us that we have to wash our hands? Who are you to say that our hands are dirty? I'm just sort of paraphrasing it. But that's what he came up against. And then the thing that he didn't do, and in hindsight, maybe he should have done. But there were many reasons why he didn't because he didn't publish his results right away. So that took a while. So he met he met a lot of resistance. And finally he was let go. And he went back to Hungary and he tried to institute it there. And he was able to institute a little bit of it there. But eventually, um, he got married and then his wife thought there was something wrong with him because he was always so obsessed with this and she wanted to have him instituted. So he was tricked into being put in a sane asylum. And it's not clear whether he was insane or not. It's really not clear. But he did die right away because something happened at the institution, and he was beat up by the attendants, and he himself died of the injuries.
00:26:40 Megan Antonelli: Wow. So wow, what a story. I mean, and again, I mean, to that, that element of going back to sort of the trust, but the resistance that comes from just a simple change of behavior, which. So what was the time frame of that when, when that happened versus how many years later did we get fifty?
00:26:58 Dr. Barry Davis: It was about twenty, thirty years later before people like, uh, Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister came along and instituted the germ theory, and Lister had all these things for doing surgery that you would sterilize things and. Right.
00:27:14 Megan Antonelli: Yeah. And then, I mean, really, I mean, in very recent times, sort of checklist, manifesto of hand-washing and making it a regular practice, right? I mean, it was still met with resistance.
00:27:26 Dr. Barry Davis: Yeah. And actually, part of the problem with Semmelweis too, was he was a little bit of a he was a little bit of resistant himself in that he would attack people who wouldn't listen to him. Right. And there were other people in the book that were much more diplomatic.
00:27:41 Megan Antonelli: Right. Well, tell me about some of them in terms of kind of looking at the, the stories and, and where, which ones could be the most, um, sort of, we could learn the most from. And that they were, they were effective. Who would you say? You mentioned Ben Franklin. Is there another that stands.
00:28:00 Dr. Barry Davis: Several others that were effective? I mean, the next one in the book is an amazing woman, Sara Josephine Baker, who became the first woman head of a child hygiene bureau. She was in the New York City Department of Health. And her story is great because she knew how to gain the trust of people. She would go and talk to them. She would be interviewed all the time. She had an incredible relationship with the press. There were many, many articles in the New York Times in those days about her, and she would, in a calm voice, explain everything, and she would deal with the other women, trusted her, and she made a huge difference in the infant mortality rate in New York City because of her plans and implementation.
00:28:49 Dr. Barry Davis: Yeah. So it's a matter of.
00:28:52 Dr. Barry Davis: Having a platform and gaining trust, as we talked about.
00:28:55 Megan Antonelli: Yeah. So as we look at kind of today and the various both for public health prevention, and I think I don't have you, if you've read, um, Gina's book around, around trust in sort of the communication around health care. And she kind of, she puts it on the health care systems quite a bit to say, you know, it is a communication problem they have to combat in terms of sort of false information and and very much in response to the pandemic and, and vaccines and, and how you can help educate people. But as we're looking at now, obviously everyone going to chat and other forms to kind of get their answers. What would you say to the leaders of healthcare systems today in terms of what their role is to, to be prevention ears themselves.
00:29:46 Dr. Barry Davis: To look out for things? Just don't go ahead and implement stuff. You need to be sure that it's the right action for what you want to do, and you need to be able to collect data to make sure that it's it's okay. But again, I said that problem about delayed certainty. You don't want to wait too long to do something and you need to build in, as you had said many times during this conversation about trust, you need to convince other people, and you need to gain a lot of people on your side by showing them data and evidence that this can work. But sometimes things may not work. And we have backups. We may say, let's pull this, let's stop this. But we need to sort of build that in from the beginning.
00:30:29 Megan Antonelli: Yeah, no, I think it is this that that dichotomy of having the information, not taking too long with it and building the trust and then getting people to, to respond and answer. And what I find that I still come back to kind of that even when it's an easy change, even when it's an obvious benefit, it can still be hard.
00:30:50 Dr. Barry Davis: Oh, yes. Yes. Well, going against the status quo is always extremely hard, and it depends upon the question and the evidence and so on. What's ingrained. But when you um try to change things, it just nobody wants to do that. I mean, I think of the case of the, the person who came up with the um for ulcers. Well, everybody knew stress caused ulcers. Everybody knew that. This guy is crazy. What is he saying? That a bacterium causes ulcers and he had to go. And he took some. An incredible leap to prove it. But, uh, he did. He went on to win the Nobel Prize. But yeah, this it's the status quo. And what's the prevailing opinion and how do you convince others to, to do things? It takes a lot of patience and persuasion and credibility. I trusted nobody's going to listen to me.
00:31:52 Megan Antonelli: Right. And I do think that there's the the good thing and you mentioned this about, um, Ben Franklin is the platform, right? Having the platform to do it is what makes, um, the I'm going to start from the beginning so that we don't get my dog jumping on this one. No, but like we said with Ben Franklin, the having the platform to do that. And I think so many of our healthcare leaders do. And there is so many there's people are paying attention on various channels to give them that information. So making sure that they are kind of in control of that narrative is important too. And that there, while a lot of this is, is this sort of heavy stuff and there's, there's a lot to, there's a lot of layers to which sort of public health and prevention, but also where our kind of technology ecosystem fits into this and, and what health system leaders can do. We always like to end with kind of the bright note, the five good things. So to think about what's exciting you about right now in terms of where there's this opportunity, what are you, what, what, what gets you out of bed in the morning, so to speak, to that aren't diseases and disasters, but maybe on the discovery side?
00:33:09 Dr. Barry Davis: Well, what we've been talking about, this whole thing about AI, I mean, I said that AI on the good side has this great potential. When you put the right input in, you can get it very good output. So you know, it can help us. You know, there's this thing about AI, well, we're going to cure all diseases. Um, that'd be great, but I'm more interested in let's find AI to prevent all diseases. And I, what I think we might be great is how you apply AI to prevent things on an on an on a large scale. I mean, most of the drivers of, of disease are things that were called the social determinants of health. You're not well educated or educated at all. Or if you're don't have a great income or you're in poor housing, or you live in a bad neighborhood and so on and so on. Sometimes people would say that I can tell you how healthy you are depending upon your zip code. So if we can use these new technologies to try and do things at scale. I mean, one of the other things that I've noticed is people talk about like diet and exercise all the time, and everybody's for years working for better diets and find time for exercise. But if you're well off and well educated, maybe you can find time and force yourself to do that. But if you're not, you know, you have so many things that you juggle. How do you do this? You live in a community that doesn't have great food choices. The so-called food deserts. You don't get much in the way of exercise. There's nothing to really do in terms of public exercise. Um, if we would try and shift our framework around so that maybe we can do things on a, on a grander scale, using these new technologies to get people to do these things.
00:35:03 Megan Antonelli: Yeah.
00:35:04 Dr. Barry Davis: That's what I.
00:35:04 Dr. Barry Davis: That's what I hope.
00:35:06 Megan Antonelli: Yeah, I, I share that hope. I think that AI has that ability to be able to help collect some of that data around the diseases, the disasters, and the discovery. It's that data that that we need to kind of make decisions and not to over overdo the alliterations on the deeds, but it is that's what will then empower and enable us to really have prevention that is informed, right? Which is, which is the goal for sure. Yeah. Well, so great to talk to you. I love, um, you know, hearing about the book and kind of the, the thinking about this. And I think there's no more right now to look back at the history of this and have it inform how we kind of take a step forward into this, you know, somewhat brave new world with AI. It's, it's super important. Tell our audience when the book comes out, how they can get their hands on it. Um, follow you follow your work.
00:36:04 Dr. Barry Davis: Okay.
00:36:05 Dr. Barry Davis: Well, the book comes out May fifth. It's from Johns Hopkins University Press, although I've had friends say they've already received the book. You can get it on Amazon or any of the other places where books are sold.
00:36:17 Dr. Barry Davis: Perfect.
00:36:18 Dr. Barry Davis: And my work, I have a I have a Substack, which is called an Ounce of Prevention, appropriately named, where I talk about all sorts of prevention issues. I even had a thing maybe last year about digital prevention, but I cover all sorts of topics in there, from disasters to diseases. A lot of disasters are related to climate change nowadays, and I talk about that a lot. And, um, maybe I'll work on another book. We'll see.
00:36:49 Dr. Barry Davis: Yeah.
00:36:49 Megan Antonelli: Well, I love that an ounce of prevention. Everyone should check it out on Substack, a fabulous platform for publishing and publishers. Will. So great to meet you, Doctor Davis. I appreciate you joining us. And, uh, you know, look forward to getting the book in the hands of our audience and to our audience listeners, again, the name of the book is The prevention, errors, diseases, disasters and Discoveries that Changed our World, and it will be out from Johns Hopkins in May. And I think that the lesson here is, if you lead a health care system and you're trying to make sense of public trust and prevention and where that intersects, even with AI governance, this is for you and his newsletter, an ounce of Prevention is it will be also linked to the show notes. So again, thanks, Doctor Davis. And if this conversation got you thinking that is the whole point. That's why we're here. Share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on YouTube. And this is Megan Antonelli from Health Impact Live. And this is digital health talks, where operators do real work that makes healthcare better for everyone. Until next week. Let's keep fixing health care one conversation at a time.
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