HIMSSCast: Fighting back against healthcare misinformation in the era of social media and genAI

Mis- and disinformation have long been a significant challenge to health and wellness, even before the pandemic showed just how damaging they can be. How should medical professionals push back? Dr. Geeta Nayyar has some answers.

By Mike Miliard

June 28, 2024

12:55 PM

Photo: Tetra Images/Getty Images

Dr. Geeta Nayyar – known by many as "Dr. G" – has a long track record as a physician IT leader who thinks creatively about the intersection of technology and healthcare. Her jobs over the years have included serving as chief medical officer of tech giants such as AT&T and Salesforce. She sits on the board of the American Telemedicine Association. She's an advisor to the American Medical Association. You may have seen her this past March onstage as the conference host and emcee of HIMSS24.

She's also an author. Nayyar's most recent USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Dead Wrong: Diagnosing and Treating Healthcare's Misinformation Illness, explores the profound personal and public health risks associated with digitally propagated mis- and disinformation.

The harmful effects of inaccurate medical info were seen most starkly during the years-long COVID-19 crisis, of course. But they've long been a significant challenge and remain so to this day. In some ways, in fact, the challenge is only getting more insidious as online social media evolves and the unhealthy side-effects of technology – ill-informed "influencers" on TikTok or Instagram, hallucinatory generative AI chatbots, falsehood-spewing deep fakes – proliferate.

Later this summer, Nayyar is scheduled to deliver the opening keynote of the HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum, which kicks off in Boston on Sept. 5. We spoke with her recently about misinformation in healthcare, how AI is exacerbating the problem and what conscientious professionals can do to push back on it, ensuring their patients are educated and equipped with the information that can keep them healthy.

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Talking points:

Why Dead Wrong needed to be written, and why now was the time to write it
The public health implications – now and in the future – of rampant misinformation
How technology contributes to the problem
How it could help ameliorate it
The importance of informed public discourse, in health policy and beyond?
What a new era of toxic social media, genAI, deep fakes, etc., mean for misinformation.
How the healthcare industry can push back on inaccurate or harmful info