A fellow doctor recently told me how he once was on a flight in business class with 30 oncologists and that, when asked “is there a doctor on the plane?, they all bowed their heads and none stood up.

I find this surprising because I know more doctors who find it natural to help than the opposite. 

 

And furthermore, it can only be explained by laziness, not by legal risk, because when I was at the hospital and we were the reference site for the airport (many inflight strokes were brought to us), reviewing the subject for a clinical session, there was no precedent of complaints against doctors for assisting on an flight.

 

 

I once took care of a first seizure right next to me. 

 

I did nothing more than reassuring, but isn’t it a big coincidence that you have a first seizure on a flight and the person next to you is a neurologist?

 

And again, and perhaps one of the most beautiful stories of my life, I decided in 60 seconds like in a movie (because that was the time they gave us at the New York airport before losing the slot to leave) that a flight attendant with a decreased level of consciousness had nothing serious and that we could take off. 

 

The funny thing is that the flight attendant had a history of alcoholism and apparently she was gambling with the custody of her daughter, and if we had not taken off, with the millions of dollars in losses that this would have entailed, it is likely that her life would have been derailed.

 

I´m not making up the story.

 

This was told to me months later by the pilot, whom I befriended and remain friends with to this day. 

 

 

Things connect, my friend, and it’s not like Steve Jobs on Linkedin talk; they really connect. All the time.

That’s why it’s better not to keep your head down too much.

 

Or at least to be as little of an asshole as possible.

 

And I’m an asshole everyday and sometimes I don’t recycle. 

 

 

But the chained and collaborative stories lead me to the Pharmacy Service of a big hospital (Sant Pau in Barcelona), where they have always welcomed our AI technology with interest and have persisted in its use until, finally, we have been able to demonstrate that with Savana we have found 257 patients of a certain pathology that they were looking for (I will not say which one in case of privacy), when with their gold standard information system they found 206 patients.

And this is less glamorous than attending stewardesses at JFK with 300 people looking at you and then getting out of the plane like a bullfighter.

 

But I think the thing is much more serious and more important than the ego of a simple doctor. 

 

 

It’s about something as basic as using technological tools that already exist in other fields to count patients.

Counting patients. That’s what we do at Savana sometimes.

 

 

How small. 

 

And how big.