John Duffield was living a completely normal life.
He was working in AI. Fortune 500 companies. Helping healthcare organizations rethink how they work. Staying on top of an emerging field that was changing everything.
He was a previous triathlete. Healthy. Active. Playing with his kids. No sense of what was coming.
Then in June 2024, he ended up in the neurology ward at UCLA Ronald Reagan with a brain bleed.
He didn’t go to the hospital expecting a brain bleed. He certainly didn’t go expecting what came next.
The Double Hit
While John was recovering from the brain bleed, the cardiologists came in.
They’d heard a murmur on his scan. They’d seen it. A bicuspid aortic valve. The doctors said some people live their entire lives like this. Others need surgery.
But the news hit him and his wife hardest because they were already reeling. They were vulnerable. They’d just gotten news about a brain bleed. Now this.
“It was like a bang, bang, double hit,” John says. “It was an incredible hit to take for my wife and myself, and having to keep that in and not tell my children and too many until we really knew what was happening.”
They got back to the East Coast and started meeting with cardiologists almost immediately.
Further tests revealed it wasn’t just a bicuspid valve. He had severe regurgitation, a leaky aortic valve. And an aneurysm measuring significantly wide.
The window was initially two to ten years. How do you live your life knowing major surgery could be coming? How do you function with that hanging over your head?
Then the tests came back clearer.
The window shrank. From years to weeks. To a month.
Game on pretty quick at that point.
The Blessing of Time (And Choice)
John was very blessed to have great insurance and the ability to meet with surgeons quickly.
But more than that, he had a choice. Which type of procedure. Which surgeon. Which approach. He could see who he felt most comfortable with and choose the path forward.
Many people don’t get that. Many people get emergency situations with no planning time. Chaos. Panic. Everything happening at once.
John had time to worry. Time to process. Time to think about what was coming.
“I’ve since met with many patients who have been through cardiac procedures,” he says. “Some faced emergency situations with no planning time. Others had the time to plan like I did. Both are rough in different ways.”
But John made a choice in that time. A choice to lean into his strengths.
AI as a Companion
John works in AI. He’s spent years helping healthcare organizations transform with artificial intelligence.
But now he was a patient facing open heart surgery.
And he realized something. He could use all that expertise on himself.
He could take his clinical narrative. Everything about his diagnosis. All the test results. The options. Open heart surgery. Sparing his own valve. Replacing it with a mechanical valve. The recovery process.
All of it.
And he could turn it into something his children could understand.
His daughter was nine years old.
She was obsessed with Taylor Swift.
So John took his entire clinical narrative and fed it into AI with one request: explain this through Taylor Swift lyrics and trivia.
“It was truly like magic,” he says.
AI took the complexity of open heart surgery and reduced it to the context his nine-year-old could understand. Songs she loved. Lyrics that matched his journey. A way to explain what was happening to daddy’s heart that didn’t sound like a medical textbook.
His wife and John looked at each other. “Gosh, this is it. You’ve got to make a song for her.”
So he did. He directed it. ChatGPT composed it and wrote it. Another AI tool handled the music production. And John gave his daughter a song that explained her father’s surgery in her language.
He did the same thing with his son using basketball mechanics. Complex medical reality translated into the language of the game he loved.
“I realized that we are at the emergence of a time where we can take complex, turn it into clarity through the context that a person can truly understand and relate to,” John says. “And I don’t think we’ve ever been able to do that before.”
AI as a Second Voice, Not a Second Opinion
There’s a distinction John is careful to make.
AI can be powerful as a second voice. A companion. Something to help you think through things. Something to help you ask better questions.
But AI cannot give you a clinical diagnosis. Cannot give you a definitive on what something is or what it isn’t.
And it can never put a hand on your shoulder. Can never give you the gentle voice of a family member. Can never give you the expert bedside manner of a clinician.
“The most powerful use of AI,” John says, “is at 2:00 AM before open heart surgery when anxiety is highest and the hospital’s asleep. When you don’t want to go down a Google rabbit hole or read information in a booklet. When you want answers that are context-relevant to your situation.”
That’s when AI shines. When you can ask the same question 38 different ways without feeling embarrassed. When you can get clarity without having to wait for someone else to wake up.
But here’s the thing. Most people use AI as a second opinion. John uses it as a second voice.
A second opinion is something that should come from a licensed clinician. A second voice might tell you there are other alternatives. Might there be other research? Other clinical trials? All the what-if questions you didn't get to ask in that highly emotional consult with a surgeon.
Because when you’re sitting across from a surgeon, you’re so worried and panicked that you don’t retain anything. You forget all your questions. You’re just trying to process the overwhelming.
But afterward, when you have time and AI at 2:00 AM, you can think through things differently.
The Moment Everything Changed
John’s care team came into his room at Cleveland Clinic.
They’d already done one open heart surgery. His sternum was being held together by wires, plates, and screws.
Now they needed to go back in. Twenty days after the first surgery. Before the first surgery had even healed.
“Our whole world fell apart,” John says.
But in that moment, something shifted for him too.
He realized this wasn’t just something happening to him. This was something that happened for a reason.
He was meant to shine a light on the patient journey. He was meant to combine his knowledge of healthcare and innovation and AI and patient experience. He was born to tell that story and do something with that moment.
“I felt that I need to do something and raise more awareness of this so that patients coming after me can get a glimpse into the types of tools that could help them and their families in some way navigate such a difficult experience,” he says.
He wanted to thank the people who made YouTube videos about open heart surgery that helped him so much. And he wanted to give back for those coming after him.
The Future Patient
John’s launching a book called The Future Patient.
It comes out September 29.
The book is his journey through leveraging AI and his wife’s love and support to get through back-to-back open heart surgeries. It’s his behind-the-scenes view of what it takes to get through complex procedures when things go bumpy.
And throughout the book are QR codes. Scan them and you’ll see behind-the-scenes recordings John and his wife made from the ICU right through to recovery and coming home. A glance all the way through.
He’s also hosting a launch event in New York City to think about the future of care. Patients. Clinicians. Innovators all in the room talking about what does it mean to leverage these tools. How do we get these tools into patients’ hands for any type of complex condition.
His Vision
If time, money, and institutional gatekeeping were all off the table, what would John build?
A digital twin.
A companion for every single person that would be a digital version of their human genome. Their entire medical history. Everything that makes up who they are biologically.
“Think of digital twin,” John says. “I feel the next evolution of care is not going to be how to plan recovery. It’s going to be how to predict recovery. Knowing exactly the impact a surgery or a medicine or eating a piece of food is going to have on your body and your longevity.”
Imagine knowing exactly what effect a life choice would have on your health before you made it. Imagine having personalized predictive medicine based on your entire genetic makeup.
That’s the future John sees.
Favorite Things
Fluorescent yellow is John’s favorite color. He’s the first person to say that in all of the episodes.
David Bowie is his musician. He’s got an old soul when it comes to music. Born in England, raised in Australia, and always drawn to the English bands.
Colombia is the place he wants to visit most. His wife is Colombian, speaks fluent Spanish. Their kids are learning Spanish. They haven’t been as a family yet to chase her family’s roots. But that’s changing next year. He made a commitment to his son.
Australia is always in his heart. His family’s there. They go a lot. But in terms of a tropical destination, the Maldives.
And one thing most people don’t know about him: twenty years ago, he nearly died paragliding in Austria. The chute didn’t open, got stuck in his arms, they crashed into the side of a mountain and had to be rescued by helicopter.
He also swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco twice during his triathlon days. Stories for the grandkids.
Connect With John
Everything John’s working on is at thefuturepatient.com
That’s where you’ll find:
The Future Patient book (launches September 29)
Launch event details for New York City (thinking about the future of care and patient experience)
His AI transformation and adoption consultancy services:
The book has QR codes throughout for behind-the-scenes recordings from his ICU recovery.
You can follow his work and stay connected through his website.
Final Thoughts
John Duffield was an AI expert who could speak intelligently about the future of healthcare. But he didn’t need to imagine what it would be like to go through a complex medical crisis. He lived it.
And in that crisis, he did something remarkable. He didn’t just survive it. He turned his professional expertise into something that could help his family survive it too.
He created songs and basketball plays and explanations that made sense to the people he loved most. He used AI not as a replacement for human care, but as a companion when human care wasn’t available.
And now he’s writing about it. Speaking about it. Building on it.
Because the next patient who gets told they need open heart surgery, the next family that has to sit with that news and figure out how to tell their kids, maybe they’ll read John’s story.
Maybe they’ll think about AI as a second voice instead of a second opinion.
Maybe they’ll realize that using every tool at your disposal, even the ones from your day job, isn’t giving up on human connection. It’s expanding what human connection can mean.
That’s advocacy. That’s turning your crisis into a map for the people coming after you.
Before you go, I want to pass something along.
John Duffield, is a two-time open-heart surgery survivor who leaned on AI to get through the hardest stretch of his life. He used it to understand his own diagnosis, to walk into surgery with the right questions, even to explain what was happening to his young daughter in a way she could hold onto. Now he’s building something for patients on that same road, and he’s looking for clinicians to be part of it.
If you’re a surgeon, a cardiologist, or an oncologist based in NYC, or you know one who cares about the patient on the other side of the chart, this is worth your time. It’s invitation-based. You can request one here: https://thefuturepatient.com/invite/
Share it with anyone who should be in the room. That’s how this work moves.
Because sometimes the best tools for navigating your crisis aren’t medical. They’re the ones that help you make sense of the medical.
And sometimes those tools come from the most unexpected places.
