AI Council | Pulse Check: What’s Real in Personalized Healthcare?

AI may have an outsized impact on healthcare—not only on how disease is treated, but on how each of us understands and manages our health throughout life, at every age and every level of well-being. Imagine a medical system that knows your normal: your baseline, patterns, and risks, and can recognize when something begins to change, perhaps before you even know something is wrong. That is the vision of truly personalized medicine. But how close are we today? Healthcare still relies heavily on snapshots: a 15-minute appointment, a lab result, an ECG taken at a particular moment. Yet most of our health unfolds between those encounters. What happens in the weeks and months before symptoms appear—or between repeated visits for the same concern—is rarely captured as part of one continuous picture. That picture is beginning to fill in. At-home test kits, biological samples, wearables, monitoring devices, continuous glucose data, and other information collected over time are extending healthcare beyond the clinic. AI can help connect these signals, identify patterns, and surface changes that may be difficult to detect during an occasional office visit. Join the UC San Diego AI Alumni Council for a candid pulse check on personalized healthcare: what is already possible, where meaningful traction is occurring, and how far we have come toward care designed around the individual rather than the average patient. Leading the discussion will be UC San Diego alumnus Giorgio Quer, Ph.D., Director of Artificial Intelligence and Assistant Professor of Digital Medicine at the Scripps Research Translational Institute. Drawing on current work in diabetes, cardiovascular health, infectious disease, and maternal health, Dr. Quer will explore: How at-home and continuous health data are changing what we can know about an individualWhere AI is already helping uncover patterns and identify risks earlierHow AI can augment, not replace, physicians’ expertise and judgmentWhere personalize