What the Healthcare System Gets Wrong: A Patient's Perspective on AI and the Future of Health Data
Rebecca Veksler is a keynote speaker, entrepreneur and co-founder of Lumie, an AI powered health data platform. Having spent over a decade navigating chronic illness and a fragmented healthcare system firsthand, she brings a rare patient perspective to the conversation about AI, health data and the future of care. She speaks on AI for healthcare and the future of health data through Saxton Speakers Bureau.
I have sat in more doctors' offices than I can count.
I have carried folders of pathology results from appointment to appointment, repeating my history to each new specialist from scratch. I have been told to lose weight. I have been told to get on the pill. I have been told, at 21, that I would probably never fully recover, and that I should learn to manage my symptoms and get on with it.
And I have sat across from a functional medicine practitioner for the first time in my life and felt, for the first time, like someone was actually trying to understand what was happening in my body rather than just managing the most obvious symptom in front of them.
That contrast, between fragmented, reactive, symptom focused care and integrated, proactive, whole person care, is what drives everything I am building with Lumie. And it is what I believe AI has the genuine potential to transform, if we let the patient perspective lead the way.
The Problem With the Healthcare System Nobody Talks About Enough
Here is the thing about the healthcare system that patients know and most health policy conversations miss: the data exists. The pathology results, the scan reports, the specialist letters, the wearable data, the medication history. It all exists.
It just does not talk to itself.
Every time I moved between specialists, every time I started with a new GP, every time I had a new test run, the information was somewhere. But it was scattered across filing systems, inboxes, paper folders and patient portals that did not integrate with each other. Nobody had the full picture. Not even me.
And when nobody has the full picture, the best you can do is treat the part of the picture that is visible right now. Which is often not the part that matters most.
This is not a criticism of individual healthcare professionals, many of whom are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work within a system that makes their job much harder than it needs to be. It is a systems problem. The infrastructure of healthcare was not designed for integrated, longitudinal, whole person care. It was designed for acute, episodic intervention.
AI has the potential to change that. But only if we approach it with a genuine understanding of what patients actually need, not just what is technically possible.
What Functional Medicine Taught Me About What Good Care Looks Like
Discovering functional medicine changed my life. That is not an overstatement.
For the first time, I had a practitioner who looked at my whole picture. Who ran deep, complex functional testing rather than standard panels. Who sat with me and explained what the results actually meant. Who educated and empowered me rather than just prescribing. Who asked questions about my stress, my sleep, my relationships, my history, and understood that all of those things were relevant to what was happening in my body.
The difference in outcome was extraordinary. Not because functional medicine is magic. But because integrated, whole person care that actually connects the dots produces fundamentally different results than fragmented, episodic care that treats each symptom in isolation.
This is the standard that AI powered health technology should be reaching for. Not just digitising the existing fragmented system. Not just making it faster to do what we already do. But creating the conditions for genuinely integrated, personalised, proactive care that treats people as whole human beings rather than collections of symptoms.
Why AI Has the Potential to Transform Patient Experience
When I co-founded Lumie alongside Dr Sophia Moscovis, a scientist with a PhD in Immunology and Genetics and over 20 years in healthcare transformation and digital health, the question we started with was not what can AI do in healthcare. It was what does a patient actually need.
The answer, from my own lived experience and from the experiences of the people around me, was surprisingly consistent.
They need their data to be in one place, synthesised and made sense of, rather than scattered across systems that do not communicate.
They need to be able to ask questions and get answers that are grounded in their own specific health picture, not generic information that may or may not apply to them.
They need support navigating the system, knowing which questions to ask, which appointments to prioritise, which results need follow up and which are within normal range for their particular history.
They need someone, or something, that remembers. That holds the thread of their health story across time rather than starting from scratch at every appointment.
AI can do all of these things. Not as a replacement for the healthcare professionals who are essential to good care. But as the infrastructure that makes genuinely connected, informed, whole person care possible at scale.
The Mental Load of Managing Your Own Health
Something that rarely gets talked about in healthcare conversations is the mental load.
The load of keeping track of every result, every appointment, every medication, every referral. Of being the only person in the system who has access to your complete history. Of having to advocate for yourself, often while you are sick and exhausted and frightened, in a system that was not designed to make that easy.
I have lived this. I know what it is to sit in a specialist's office and try to remember, off the top of your head, what your ferritin was six months ago and whether your inflammatory markers have gone up or down since your last round of testing.
I also know what it is to be managing this not just for yourself but for ageing parents, for children, for family members who do not speak the same language as the healthcare system. The mental load of being the health manager for a family is enormous, and it falls disproportionately on women.
This is one of the problems Lumie is built to solve. Not because technology is the answer to everything. But because having the right information, in the right place, at the right time, in a form that is actually understandable, genuinely changes what is possible for a patient and their family.
What Patient Led Innovation Actually Means
There is a lot of talk in the health technology space about patient centred care. Much less of it is actually led by patients.
The most transformative health innovations I have seen are the ones that started with a genuine, lived understanding of what patients experience. Not what clinicians observe. Not what administrators track. What it actually feels like to be a person navigating illness, uncertainty and a system that was not designed with you in mind.
Patient led innovation does not mean building technology without clinical expertise. Dr Sophia Moscovis brings the deep scientific and clinical knowledge that is essential to building something that is not just helpful but genuinely safe and sound. It means ensuring that the patient's experience, the frustrations, the gaps, the things that make care harder than it needs to be, is the starting point rather than an afterthought.
This is the lens I bring to the conversation about AI and healthcare. Not as a technologist. Not as a clinician. As a patient who needed something that did not exist, and decided to help build it.
What the Future of Health Data Could Look Like
Imagine a world where your complete health picture is in one place. Where your pathology results, your scans, your wearable data, your specialist letters and your medication history are synthesised into a coherent, living document that updates in real time and travels with you across every touchpoint in the health system.
Where before every appointment, you receive a summary of what is relevant to discuss, what questions to ask, and what the key changes have been since your last visit.
Where your GP and your specialist and your allied health team are all working from the same picture rather than isolated fragments.
Where the patterns that matter, the slow changes in inflammatory markers over time, the correlation between sleep and symptom flares, the medication interactions that only become visible when you look at the whole picture, are visible before they become crises rather than after.
This is not science fiction. The technology exists. The barrier is not capability. It is integration, incentive and a genuine commitment to putting the patient at the centre of the system rather than at the end of it.
That is the future worth building toward. And it is the conversation I am committed to having on every stage I speak from.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI and the Future of Health Data
How is AI changing healthcare? AI is transforming healthcare by enabling the integration, analysis and interpretation of health data at a scale and speed that was previously impossible. From synthesising pathology results and imaging data to supporting clinical decision making and personalising treatment recommendations, AI has the potential to shift healthcare from reactive, episodic care to proactive, personalised and integrated whole person care.
What is health data integration and why does it matter? Health data integration is the process of bringing together health information from multiple sources, pathology labs, imaging centres, wearables, specialist letters, GP records, into a single coherent picture. It matters because fragmented data produces fragmented care. When no single clinician or system has access to a patient's complete health story, important patterns are missed, tests are repeated unnecessarily and patients are left to manage the gaps themselves.
What is patient led innovation in healthcare? Patient led innovation in healthcare means starting the design and development process from a genuine, lived understanding of the patient experience, rather than from clinical observation or administrative convenience alone. It prioritises the frustrations, gaps and unmet needs that patients themselves identify as most significant, and ensures those insights shape the technology and systems being built.
What is functional medicine and how does it differ from conventional medicine? Functional medicine is an approach to healthcare that focuses on identifying and addressing the root causes of illness rather than managing symptoms in isolation. It takes a whole person approach, considering the complex interactions between genetics, environment, lifestyle and health history, and typically involves deep diagnostic testing and highly personalised treatment protocols. It differs from conventional medicine primarily in its focus on integration and root cause rather than episodic and symptomatic intervention.
What is Lumie and what problem does it solve? Lumie is an AI powered health data platform co-founded by Rebecca Veksler and Dr Sophia Moscovis. It is designed to synthesise health data from multiple sources into a single, coherent and accessible picture, supporting patients and families to navigate the health system with better information, more relevant insights and clearer guidance about what to do next. It was built to solve the problem of fragmented health data from the patient's perspective.
What does Rebecca Veksler speak about regarding AI and healthcare? Rebecca Veksler speaks on AI for healthcare and the future of health data, bringing a rare patient perspective to the conversation about health technology and innovation. Drawing on her own decade long experience navigating chronic illness within a fragmented health system, and her experience co-founding Lumie alongside Dr Sophia Moscovis, she speaks for health sector associations, corporate wellness teams, medical conferences and any audience sitting at the intersection of technology and human care. She is represented by Saxton Speakers Bureau.
Rebecca Veksler is a keynote speaker, entrepreneur and co-founder of Lumie, an AI powered health data platform. She speaks on AI for healthcare, the future of health data and consumer psychology through Saxton Speakers Bureau. To enquire about bookings, visit rebeccaveksler.com