Three years ago, an ECG apparently found atrial fibrillation.

I found out last week, three years later.

The data existed. The test was done. Somewhere, a result was saved under my name and NHS number in the system.

But that information never turned into knowledge.

Nobody told me.

I think the real problem in healthcare is becoming clear. We are losing the relationships that turn information into knowledge.

We talk all the time about healthcare data, digital tools, shared records, AI, patient portals, and dashboards.

We keep building bigger places to store information, but at the same time, we are breaking down the human relationships that give it meaning.

Primary healthcare is becoming platformised.

Systems change. Providers change. Contracts are given out and then replaced. New leaders arrive with new plans and often bring in new companies to help. One platform closes, and another starts. Data is moved, cleaned, and connected through another tool.

Somewhere in this long chain of technology, there is a patient.

Still in the same body.

The patient is the only constant part of the system.

I have had a strange relationship with physical intensity for as long as I can remember.

My toddler’s nickname was “Wait for me”.

If I push myself too hard, get overheated, stop suddenly after exercise, or go through any big physical change, my body can react in a big way. I call these episodes “passey-outey” because I work in marketing, not cardiology, and no one ever gave me a better word for it.

Over the years, there have been conversations with doctors, pulse readings, an ECG, and episodes discussed in different rooms with different people.

Individually, these are data points.

Together, they may be a pattern.

But who is responsible for holding the pattern?

Increasingly, the answer is the patient.

We are the only ones who stay with ourselves throughout our healthcare journey. Doctors come and go. Practices merge. Software changes. Services start, stop, and restart under new names.

The patient remains.

Yet healthcare often treats the patient as the least reliable part of their own long-term record, even though the patient is the one who keeps the story going.

“I was told…”

“I remember this happening before…”

“I’ve always reacted like this…”

These statements are often seen as soft information, just anecdotes or patient memories.

Meanwhile, the computer has a result from 2023 stored in a database, but no one has told the person whose heart it came from.

Great. The database knows.

Data without a relationship is just storage, not knowledge.

There is a difference between storing information and knowing a patient.

Relationship creates context.

A doctor who has seen someone over time may know that a pulse of 95 is unusually good for that person. Another clinician, seeing the number in isolation, sees only its relationship to a population reference range.

A patient may describe a lifelong physical pattern that sounds vague in a ten-minute appointment. Across ten years, however, that pattern may become clinically meaningful.

Continuity allows individual data points to accumulate into knowledge.

Without continuity, healthcare repeatedly encounters the patient as if for the first time.

This is not just annoying; it leads to dirty data.

It’s not dirty because the blood pressure reading is wrong, but because its meaning is incomplete.

The number is clean.

The context is missing.

Now we expect AI to fix this problem.

This matters enormously as healthcare begins its inevitable love affair with artificial intelligence.

AI is exceptionally good at finding patterns.

But it cannot find patterns in information that has been repeatedly separated from its context, inconsistently recorded or left stranded across systems.

The idea of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is not new, and calling something ‘clinical AI’ in a presentation does not change that.

If we want better AI outputs in healthcare, we need better longitudinal data.

If we want better longitudinal data, we need continuity.

And continuity is not just a software problem. It is a relationship problem.

It is a relationship problem.

A clinician who knows the patient contributes something extraordinarily valuable to the dataset: longitudinal interpretation.

The patient contributes something equally valuable: continuity of lived experience.

The technology should connect those two sources of knowledge.

Instead, we seem set on removing relationships, breaking up the system, and then asking AI to piece together the patient’s story from scattered digital clues.

This is a costly way to try to regain context.

The right to a relationship

Maybe we should stop talking about continuity of care as just a nice feature of a good healthcare system and start treating it as something patients really need.

Maybe patients need the right to a relationship, because continuity should be seen as essential, not optional.

This doesn’t mean seeing the same doctor every Tuesday at 10:15 for forty years. Healthcare is complicated. People move. Doctors retire. Life rarely goes as planned.

I mean the right to a healthcare relationship that persists.

A named clinical home.

Clear ownership of longitudinal information.

Responsibility for connecting significant findings to the person they concern.

Systems should be built around the patient’s ongoing care, not just the length of the latest contract or the newest platform.

Because ‘first, do no harm’ does not begin only when a doctor chooses a treatment.

It starts with making sure the patient is not lost between visits.

It starts with making sure an important test result leads to a real conversation.

It starts with keeping the context intact.

Surgeons agree

Technology cannot substitute for a relationship.

This issue is not just about primary care. Surgeons leading in digital medicine are noticing the same problem. Dr Rafael Grossmann, a surgeon and early user of wearable technology, AI, and extended reality in clinical practice, has warned that technology can make healthcare professionals “forget the person in front of us”. He says the risk is that patients become numbers, cases, or pathologies instead of being seen as people with a disease.

This warning matters because the relationship between clinician and patient is not just a sentimental extra in modern medicine. It is one of the ways technology becomes meaningful. A sensor can take a measurement. An algorithm can spot an anomaly. An AI system can find a pattern. But someone still needs to connect that information to a person, explain it, understand it in light of their history, and decide what to do next.

From my own experience, I have seen a small example of Grossmann’s bigger point. A machine can detect something correctly, but the healthcare system can still fail if no one completes the human part of the process.

Better relationships. Cleaner data. Better AI.

We often act like human relationships and technology are two opposite ways to do healthcare.

They are not.

In fact, the future of healthcare AI might depend on bringing back something very traditional: truly knowing the patient.

Relationship creates continuity.

Continuity creates context.

Context creates cleaner, richer longitudinal data.

Better data creates better AI output.

Three years ago, a machine might have correctly detected something in my heart.

The technology did its job.

The data existed.

What broke down was the connection between the information and me.

And no amount of digital transformation can truly be called progress until we restore that relationship.

Relationship is part of the healthcare data infrastructure.

The future of healthcare will be more digital, more connected, and shaped by artificial intelligence. But technology alone cannot make up for the loss of relationships. In fact, relationships become even more important. Relationship is part of the healthcare data infrastructure. It creates continuity. Continuity preserves context. Context produces cleaner, long-term data. Better data gives both clinicians and AI a better chance to see the whole patient, not just a list of disconnected events. If we want smart healthcare, we cannot keep building systems that forget the person they are meant to help. The right to relationship is not just nostalgia for old medicine. It is needed for a safer, smarter system.

Call to action

It is not the clinician’s fault. It isn’t the patient’s fault. My call to action is: Let’s work together for a <<RIGHT TO RELATIONSHIP>>