The Agentic Patient 3: When ChatGPT from Parents Meets Clinical AI Decision Support Systems

Diana Ferro works at a major pediatric hospital in Italy, working on AI infrastructure, rare diseases, and — importantly — the International Alliance of Pediatric Centers on AI. Unlike the patient voices earlier in the Agentic Patient series, she sits on the other side of the consulting-room door. Her concerns are sharper, more specific, and more uncomfortable. She is not against patient AI use. She is watching what happens when desperate parents, teenagers in crisis, and sycophantic chatbots meet in a pediatric setting and she is trying to build the guardrails in real time.

Diana frames AI in pediatric medicine as a two-front problem. On one front, Italian hospitals are racing to build the data infrastructure — EU-funded — to share research across institutions and turn billing data into diagnostic and predictive tools. On the other front, patients and families are already ahead of the system, using consumer LLMs in ways that clinicians are not trained to respond to.

She describes three specific, observed harms she's seeing in pediatric practice:

1. parents using AI to deny rare-disease diagnoses,

2. adolescents using AI as a pro-eating-disorder coach by telling it they want to "lose weight to be healthy,"

3. young people with weak support systems finding AI easier to talk to than a clinician — including, she notes, in contexts tied to self-harm.

The Agentic Patient Series: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/agentic-patient-blog

Agentic Patient 6 tips: https://fodh.substack.com/p/the-agentic-patients-are-here