In AI, distribution is everything. Skills are changing the game — programs written in plain English that give agents real capabilities. No app store. No onboarding. Just instant capability delivered the moment a user needs it.
Healthcare evidence is overdue for the same shift.
The signal has always been there. Patients have been sharing their experiences publicly for years — a parent posting at 2am about symptoms no one warned them about, caregivers comparing treatment burdens in their own words, across thousands of communities. We just didn’t have the receiver tuned to the right frequency.
Surveys help fill in the gaps and remain a tool. Natural history registries built the foundation for disease understanding — but a fragmented landscape of competing registries, each capturing a narrow slice of the same patient populations, often creates more silos than signals. Meanwhile, patients are already converging in public communities, broadcasting loud and clear.
AI skills that map patient language to clinical vocabularies and surface emerging burden patterns — that’s the receiver finally tuned to the right frequency.
Every evolution in evidence compresses the distance between patient and decision. Surveys required design. Registries required enrollment. Patient experience data requires listening.
Imagine a commercial lead 18 months from launch, typing a single prompt:
“TREND, tune to the frequency that gives me a lexical map of how patients describe treatment burden — I need the community’s voice in our launch strategy.”
That’s where this is heading.