Take, for example, Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI), an initiative of the Qualitative Data Repository.

“It’s about embracing the inscrutable nature of human interactions,” says Chang. Evidence-based medicine was a massive improvement over intuition-based medicine, he says, but it only covers traditionally quantifiable data, or those things that are easy to measure. But we’re now quantifying information that was considered qualitative a generation ago.

“Our biggest opportunity is leaning into that. It’s either embracing the qualitative nature of that and designing systems that can act just on the qualitative nature of their experience, or figuring how to quantitate some of those qualitative measures,” says Chang. “That’ll get us much further, because the real value in health care systems is in the human interactions. My relationship with you as a doctor and a patient is far more valuable than the evidence that some trial suggests.”