Physician, heal thyself
CRAIG KNOCHE ’89 (EMP-19) DEVELOPED I-HUMAN PATIENTS TO HELP MEDICAL STUDENTS SHARPEN THEIR DIAGNOSTIC SKILLS
When Craig Knoche was diagnosed with cancer 20 years ago, he didn’t go through the classic stages of denial and grief. “I decided to completely reorient my life,” Knoche said.
So he left his job to focus on doing something that would make a big difference — a system to improve medical diagnostic skills that could scale to the world.
“According to the U.S. Institute of Medicine, the best estimates indicate that all of us will likely experience a meaningful diagnostic error in our lifetime resulting in approximately 40,000 to 80,000 avoidable deaths each year,” Knoche said.
i-Human Patients is a revolutionary cloud-based training program that simulates all the cognitive activities involved in a patient encounter — from taking a patient history, assessing vital signs, performing physical exams, to ordering and evaluating tests. Along the way, it provides individualized evidence-based feedback and coaching to help improve and assess diagnostic competencies.
More than 10,000 clinical students in the United States now use i-Human. With the support of former Kellogg Dean Dipak Jain, i-Human will be distributed by the Reliance Foundation throughout India, where there is presently a shortage of 1.6 million physicians and 2 million nurses, and the diagnostic error rates are significantly higher than in the United States.
“Kellogg didn’t just broaden my horizons,” Knoche said. “It also gave me the confidence to build a company and to interact with people who’ve made a huge impact on the world.”