More Data, Please

Rethink Medical Backlash Against Pervasive Testing

Reports that Midjourney is pivoting from AI-based image generation to full-body ultrasound scans have sparked a debate about the wisdom of performing widespread clinical tests. The medical community is generally advocating against the volume of testing that Midjourney is proposing. I understand their arguments, but I believe they are wrong.

This isn’t because doctors don’t understand medicine, patients, psychology, or even statistics. They do. Medical professionals are competent and genuinely invested in patient outcomes. The reason the medical community is getting this wrong is that they are failing to think through the lens of a broader data system. Understandably, their default mode of thinking engages with one patient at a time, and typically, one specific issue at a time.

But data doesn’t work that way. Data’s value is cumulative and often curves upward. More data is rarely a bad thing—provided it is used appropriately.

Currently, we miss opportunities to utilize data because of information processing limits. These limits aren’t just computational; they are also process-oriented. The maintenance of privacy across organizational boundaries and approving information flows for technical implementation. It should come as little surprise that applying AI to medical software will ease these boundaries. By automating those internals, we’ll be able to lower the obstacles without compromising on privacy controls, organizational limits, and traceable responsibility we desire.

With those obstacles gone, individuals with richer historical datasets will benefit immediately. The value of a scan, test, or medical record isn’t limited to an immediate concern. It can unlock a future insight. A future diagnosis informed by history is both more accurate and timely.

This cumulative value is what the medical community misses when they downplay the ambition of inexpensive, pervasive testing. Looking at a single patient with a single concern, an MRI (with its comprehensive snapshot) might always seem preferable to an ultrasound. But imagine an ecosystem where most patients have a baseline full-body ultrasound history, a 50-cancer screening blood test, and ten other sets of low-cost, routine diagnostics. In this ecosystem, there is a high probability that these data points will unite to form insights that a purely symptom-responsive history never could.

Individually, each cheap test won’t be conclusive enough to move a diagnosis from “possible” to “probable.” This introduces a valid concern: a test that shifts your probability of a disease from a background rate of 0.5% to 2% doesn’t merit invasive testing, but it might trigger hypochondria. But the combined history of three different inexpensive tests can shift that probability progressively—from 0.5%, to 2%, to 5%, to 15%. At 15%, invasive testing is merited. Without that cumulative history, your doctor would have rationally recommended against it, potentially missing a crucial early intervention.

Inversely, cumulative data can help avoid unnecessary invasive testing. Suppose you present symptoms that trigger concern, but your extensive testing history lowers the probability that the cause is malignant. If the symptom alone suggested a 15% risk, but your historical data shifts the overall probability down to 5%, your doctor could rationally recommend treating the symptom or taking a path with less upfront risk.

Some may interpret this as a personal call to build their own medical histories at any cost. While not entirely unreasonable, that is not my point. I’m not just thinking about individuals with enough disposable income to afford boutique medical testing¹.

Instead, I am defending the systemic value of testing that is cheap enough to be pervasive. Pervasive, low-cost testing can transform healthcare from a reactive, symptom-driven model to a proactive, data-driven one. It personalizes preventive care and provides the volume of data necessary for AI and modern analytics to spot macro-trends and micro-anomalies that a fragmented system would miss. Efforts to drive the cost of testing down to the point of pervasiveness are the foundation of that future. Those efforts should be loudly applauded, not feared.

The concerns about fueling hypochondria and over-worry are real, but ignoring the value of cheap, pervasive testing is not the solution. We already manage hypochondriac tendencies in medicine today. I wouldn’t call myself a hypochondriac, but I’m not immune to that type of feeling. In my experience, one anxiety-inducing event is the annual physical itself: cataloging every new bump or brief pain, anticipating the doctor’s questions, and overthinking the answers. We don’t suggest abandoning annual checkups just because they cause anxiety. Instead, we rely on a doctor’s bedside manner—a core component of medical training—to manage that stress.

I generally feel better once I’ve completed a checkup. I expect the outcome there depends heavily on how effectively the doctor communicates. That is where we can manage the risks associated with an influx of new medical data. We should expand our thinking beyond just the bedside manner of individual doctors, and focus on the design of the entire patient communication system.

The medical system already does this to some extent, but as we enter an era of pervasive data, there is a need for more. The answer to the anxieties of the information age isn’t to reject the data, but to design a healthcare system capable of communicating its true value.

1. It’s impossible to go from too expensive to use with a strong symptom to cheap enough to use regularly, without passing through the zone where wealth is used to access it regularly, but it’s still not cheap enough for pervasive use. So the critique of that being a possible outcome will always exist. But giving up on this basis doesn’t help much of anyone and historically, if you’re able to drop the price to the first level, the progression doesn’t stop there.