AI is changing healthcare. Here’s the patient perspective—how we can use it with context, confidence and become stronger advocates for our own health.
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Influential Woman · Construction Accounting and Autoimmune Patient Advocacy
Alice McDonnell
Founder, Autoimmune 411™
New Fairfield, CT 06812
40Years experience
1Article published
Her Story
About Alice
Alice McDonnell’s career has never followed a traditional path. It has been built through reinvention, persistence, hands-on learning, and a willingness to step into something new and figure it out from the ground up.
After graduating from high school and initially training as a hairdresser, Alice quickly changed direction and entered the airline industry at just 18 years old. What followed was a nearly 15-year career that gave her an unusually broad view of a complex industry. Her experience ranged from frontline airline operations, preparing flight manifests and working directly around aircraft, to ticketing, reservations, rates, capacity control, and eventually accounting. Moving through so many areas taught her something that would become a recurring theme throughout her career: understanding one piece is valuable, but understanding how all the pieces connect gives you an entirely different perspective.
Alice later stepped away from corporate life to focus on raising her family, a chapter she affectionately refers to as her years as a “domestic executive.” During those years, her own experience navigating Hashimoto’s thyroiditis led her down another unexpected path — patient advocacy.
In 2010, Alice founded Hashimoto’s 411®, which grew into one of the largest Hashimoto’s and autoimmune patient communities in the world. For years, the work was entirely volunteer-driven. Alice devoted countless unpaid hours to researching, educating, moderating discussions, answering questions, sharing resources, connecting patients with knowledgeable practitioners and experts, and creating a place where people could learn from both credible information and one another’s lived experiences. What began as an effort to help people with Hashimoto’s became a long-term commitment to patient education and self-advocacy.
When Alice returned to the workforce, she reinvented herself yet again — this time in construction accounting. Without following a traditional construction or accounting career path, she learned the industry from the inside out and steadily rose through increasingly responsible positions. Her experience now spans project accounting, AIA billing, accounts payable and receivable, job costing, change-order management, budgeting, financial reporting, and the financial oversight of major commercial construction projects approaching $100 million in value. Much of what she knows was developed through hands-on experience, continuous learning, asking questions, solving problems, and understanding how individual financial details affect the larger project.
Today, Alice continues to work full-time in construction accounting while building the next evolution of the patient advocacy work she began years ago.
Through years of working with the Hashimoto’s community, Alice came to recognize that many of the foundational principles she had been helping thyroid patients understand — whole-body health, root-cause thinking, personal context, health literacy, and informed self-advocacy — extend far beyond a single autoimmune diagnosis. That realization led her to broaden her work through Autoimmune 411™ and Autoimmune 411 Academy™.
Alice created the Academy to address a problem she believes has changed dramatically since she first entered patient advocacy. Years ago, patients often struggled to find enough information. Today, they face the opposite problem: an overwhelming and constantly expanding landscape of health information, social media advice, practitioners, certifications, testing, treatments, protocols, supplements, research, emerging technologies, and competing perspectives.
Her goal is not to tell patients what to think or prescribe a particular path. It is to give them a stronger foundation from which to make sense of the choices in front of them.
Built around Foundational Education, Guided Research, and Self-Advocacy, Autoimmune 411 Academy™ is designed to help people understand essential health concepts, learn how to evaluate information and resources, ask better questions, communicate more effectively with their healthcare providers, and become more informed participants in their own health journeys. Alice intentionally created it as an accessible educational resource rather than a high-cost coaching model — providing a sustainable way to expand the advocacy work she spent years offering voluntarily while keeping patient education within reach.
Her newest work also explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, health literacy, and personal context through Health Coach AI™, teaching people how to use emerging AI tools more thoughtfully to organize their health stories, research questions, recognize patterns, prepare for healthcare appointments, and better understand the information surrounding their health.
Although aviation, construction finance, and autoimmune patient advocacy may appear to be completely different worlds, Alice sees a common thread running through all of them. She has spent her career learning complicated systems from the inside out, understanding how individual pieces connect to the larger picture, identifying what may be missing, and finding better ways to organize and communicate information.
Alice considers herself largely self-taught and self-made. Her career has not been defined by a carefully mapped-out path or a single set of credentials, but by adaptability, perseverance, continuous learning, and the confidence to enter unfamiliar territory and build expertise through experience.
Now, at 57, while maintaining a demanding full-time career and continuing to grow Autoimmune 411™, Alice sees her unconventional path not as a series of unrelated careers, but as the experience that prepared her for the work she is doing today — and a story that is still very much being written.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Alice
01What do you attribute your success to?
I’ve always been a big reader, and I genuinely love research and learning. If I don’t understand something, my instinct is to dig into it until I do. I can also be stubborn — in a good way. I don’t give up easily, and I’ve never been afraid to ask questions, admit when I don’t know something, or teach myself what I need to know.
I think that willingness to keep learning has allowed me to reinvent myself several times throughout my life. I’ve stepped into industries and roles where I didn’t necessarily have the traditional background or credentials, but I was willing to put in the work, learn from people who knew more than I did, and keep building on what I learned.
I also never want to become so confident in what I know that I stop being open to what I might learn next. Whether it’s construction accounting or patient advocacy, there is always another perspective, another piece of information, or a better way of doing something.
More than anything, I attribute my success to persistence, a love of learning, and probably just enough stubbornness to keep going when something matters to me.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I honestly can’t recall one specific piece of career advice that shaped me. My career has been anything but traditional, so I’ve spent much more time adapting, learning, and figuring out what works than following a prescribed path.
What I’ve learned along the way is to persevere and never settle for “good enough.” I’m always looking for ways to grow, evolve, streamline a process, or make something work more efficiently. If there’s a better way to do something, I try to find it.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I’ve watched the construction industry change tremendously over the years, and I see more and more women stepping into project management, accounting, leadership, and other positions that were once overwhelmingly held by men. There is so much opportunity, and the sky really is the limit.
Never stop learning. Stay on top of new technology, processes, and ways of working. Be willing to evolve, ask questions, and look for better and more efficient ways to do things. Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know yet — learn it. And don’t give up just because the path isn’t easy or traditional.
And if you don't like one aspect of it, switch gears! That's perfectly ok. if you don't like your position as a Project Engineer or Assistant Project Manager then perhaps you'd prefer Project Accounting. The knowledge you bring to either side makes you even more valuable and the salary range can be similar based on experience. I've seen the best Project Managers with little understanding of the accounting side of things which is hugely important when making big decisions.
But I would add something equally important, and it comes from my years in patient advocacy: take care of yourself while you’re building your career. Autoimmune disease disproportionately affects women, who account for approximately 80% of patients, and chronic stress can influence immune and inflammatory processes. Ambition is important, but so is recognizing when your body and mind need rest and recovery.
Shoot for the stars. Keep growing. Keep evolving. Never give up on what you want — but learn to listen to yourself along the way.
Don’t borrow tomorrow’s energy today.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The opportunities in the construction industry are incredibly promising, particularly for women. When I began my career, there were relatively few women working as project managers or engineers, but I’ve been fortunate to witness that landscape evolve significantly over the years. More women are pursuing engineering and construction careers, earning the respect and recognition they deserve, and becoming highly valued professionals in the industry. It is encouraging to see this continued growth and the increasing opportunities for women to build successful, rewarding careers in the field.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values that are most important to me in both my work and personal life are perseverance, balance, and faith. I believe in staying committed even when life becomes demanding and recognizing that progress takes time. I often remind myself to be patient with the process, trust that I am on the right path, and understand that there is no need to rush. While finding balance can be challenging, especially when managing a demanding career and other responsibilities, I strive to keep learning, stay grounded, and move forward with confidence and purpose.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Alice
🤖 Your Doctor Is Using AI. You Should Be Too.
81% of physicians are already using AI professionally.
That's not according to an AI company. That's according to the American Medical Association.
So yes, patients should be using AI too. Actually, you probably already are—but are you using it correctly?
There's an enormous difference between using AI and having AI health literacy—and as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into healthcare, patients need to understand that difference just as much as physicians do.
AI can be an extraordinary tool. It can also give you an extraordinarily polished answer based on an incomplete picture. And when we're talking about your health, the picture matters.
AI Didn't Suddenly Arrive With ChatGPT
Artificial intelligence in medicine isn't new. Long before ChatGPT, researchers were exploring ways computers could assist with clinical reasoning. One of the best-known early examples was MYCIN, developed at Stanford in the 1970s to help evaluate serious bacterial infections and recommend antibiotic treatment—remarkably sophisticated for its time.
But MYCIN worked from structured information provided to it and the medical knowledge encoded within the system. It could reason impressively within the information it had. It couldn't know what hadn't been represented.
More than 50 years later, that remains one of the most important concepts patients need to understand about AI.
I Think About AI Like a Spreadsheet
My day job is in construction project accounting. I live in spreadsheets—and if you've ever worked with a complicated one, you know a formula can be completely correct and still produce an answer that doesn't accurately represent reality. A variable was missing. A cost wasn't entered. A cell referenced the wrong information. The formula did exactly what it was designed to do.
The formula can work perfectly. The context can still be wrong.
AI is obviously far more sophisticated than an Excel formula. But the underlying lesson still applies: AI's answer is shaped by the information and context available to it. That becomes incredibly important when patients start asking AI questions about their health.
"What Should I Take for Fatigue?" Isn't Much of a Health Question
Imagine opening ChatGPT and typing: What supplements should I take for fatigue? You'll probably get a perfectly reasonable-looking answer—iron, B12, vitamin D, magnesium, maybe thyroid testing, maybe sleep, maybe stress. Nothing necessarily looks wrong.
But what does the AI actually know about you? Your diagnoses, medications, complete supplement list, recent labs, ferritin, thyroid history, menstrual or menopausal status, diet, digestive symptoms, genetics, sleep, infections, surgeries, reactions to previous supplements, family history, symptom timeline, what changed right before the fatigue began?
Probably not—unless you've given it that information.
Before AI can help you connect the dots, it needs the dots.
This Is Where Patients Are Getting AI Wrong
The problem isn't that patients are using ChatGPT—I think patients should learn to use AI. The problem is that many people are using an extraordinarily powerful contextual reasoning tool almost like an upgraded Google search bar. One symptom, one question, one answer. Another symptom, another question, another answer. Eventually, you have 47 conversations containing 47 pieces of health information, with no coherent picture connecting any of them.
Ask two people the exact same question—"I'm exhausted, gaining weight, and losing my hair. What could be causing this?"—and if one has shared their full history and the other hasn't, you'll get two very different answers. Same AI, same question, completely different context.
That's especially true for people living with chronic illness and autoimmunity, where thyroid function intersects with iron status, hormones intersect with metabolism, gut symptoms affect nutrition, medications affect lab values, and sleep influences pain, cognition, and glucose regulation. One symptom can have multiple explanations. Several symptoms can share an upstream contributor.
It's also why I'm not interested in competing with the crowded market of branded health-tracking apps. Most of them require rigid daily data logging—one more task layered on top of an already exhausting health journey. Miss a few days, and the system falls apart; instead of picking back up, you feel like you're starting over. They cost money, monthly or up front, and they lock you into using only their app, their format, their interface. And if the company behind one isn't profitable, the app disappears—and your history disappears with it.
ChatGPT, Grok, Claude—these aren't small startups betting on one health-app idea. They're infrastructure, and they're only getting more capable. The AI you already have access to can do more than most of those apps combined, without asking you to log in somewhere new, log data every single day, or risk losing years of history if a company folds. You don't need five more apps for a complete picture of your health. You need one AI designed to relieve the pressure of data logging instead of adding to it—where missing a few days doesn't break anything. You just pick the conversation back up.
Context changes the conversation.
Meanwhile, Your Doctor Is Already Using AI
Physician AI use went from 38% in 2023 to 81% by 2026—more than double in three years, according to the AMA. Physicians are using it for documentation, research, summarizing medical information, and clinical workflows. Medical schools are responding too: the AAMC reported 140 U.S. and Canadian medical schools had incorporated AI into their curricula by 2024, 107 of them in required coursework.
That's a good thing. I want physicians to understand what AI does well, where it fails, how bias enters a system, how hallucinations happen, and why AI-generated information still requires human judgment.
But there's another side of this conversation that isn't getting nearly enough attention: patients need AI health literacy too.
Your Doctor Has the Clinical Record. YOU Have the Lived Record.
Your medical chart contains diagnoses, labs, imaging, medications, procedures, and clinical observations. But you carry another record that's just as important. You know your energy changed six months before a lab marker moved. You remember a symptom starting after a medication change. You know what happened when you removed a food and reintroduced it, which supplement made you feel dramatically worse, which symptoms flare together, and what your body has been doing between appointments.
Your doctor has the clinical record. You have the lived record.
AI has the potential to help patients organize that lived record in ways we simply couldn't before—and that's where things get really interesting.
AI Can Help You Ask Better Questions
The greatest misconception about AI for health is that its value is telling you what disease you have or what treatment to take. I think its real power is helping you think better: What patterns are in my history? What information is missing? What questions should I ask my physician? Are there reasonable alternative explanations I haven't considered? What research supports this claim I just saw on Instagram?
That's very different from asking, "Tell me what's wrong with me." AI doesn't need to replace your physician to dramatically improve how you participate in your own healthcare.
And Yes, Doctors Google Things
Years ago, I sat in an appointment while a physician Googled something we were discussing. Some patients would be horrified—my reaction was: good. Medicine contains an impossible amount of information, and I don't expect any human to carry it all in their head. I want practitioners who know how to find information, evaluate it, and apply it appropriately.
AI expands that ability enormously. The same standard should apply to us as patients: knowing how to find information isn't enough. We have to evaluate it, and we have to work with AI without surrendering our critical thinking to it.
AI Is Also Entering the Exam Room—and It Isn't Infallible
One of the fastest-growing applications is the AI medical scribe, which captures the appointment conversation and drafts documentation so the physician spends less time typing and more time looking at the patient. I'm all for that.
But these systems aren't infallible. During one clinical AI-scribe rollout, a physician discussed scheduling a prostate exam—the AI-generated documentation said the exam had already been performed. In another, a conversation about a patient's hands, feet, and mouth was transformed into a diagnosis of hand-foot-and-mouth disease. Those mistakes didn't sound absurd—they sounded plausible, wrapped in polished, professional language.
Which means the same rule applies on both sides of the exam room: AI-generated information requires verification. Your physician needs AI literacy. So do you.
Bad Context Can Travel
Once incorrect information enters a medical record, it follows you. A misunderstanding becomes a note. The note gets copied forward. Another clinician reads it. A future AI system summarizes it—and an error has acquired history.
AI can dramatically improve our ability to organize information. It can also dramatically improve our ability to organize incorrect information. Read your visit notes. Review your medication list. Check your test results. Ask questions when something doesn't make sense, and correct inaccuracies when appropriate. Technology doesn't eliminate self-advocacy—it makes it more important.
Generic AI Comes With a Bias You Didn't Choose
The AI didn't build its own medical worldview. It inherited one. Generic AI models are trained overwhelmingly on mainstream medical literature and reference-range thinking: symptom → test → reference range → medication, normal number → "everything looks fine." That's not a knock on the technology—it's simply the water it was trained in.
So when you ask a generic AI, "Why am I so exhausted?" you're not getting a neutral answer. You're getting one filtered through a mainstream lens that's often built to rule out disease rather than investigate dysfunction—one that tends to stop at "your labs are normal" instead of asking what's driving them there. If you've spent any time navigating chronic illness or autoimmunity, you already know how incomplete that can be.
That's exactly why the custom GPT inside Health Coach AI™ is engineered to operate from a functional-medicine, root-cause perspective instead of defaulting to conventional reference-range thinking—instructed to look for patterns and upstream contributors, not just flag whether a number falls in range. And it's exactly what I teach you to program into your own AI of choice too: how to shift the lens it reasons from, not just what information you feed it.
Context isn't only about what the AI knows about you. It's also about the framework it's using to interpret what it knows.
It's Not Just Any GPT. It's the Framework Behind It.
People naturally focus on which model, which GPT, which app. Reasonable question—just not quite the right one. A blank chatbot with no context and no structure gives a shallow answer to a shallow question, no matter how sophisticated the model underneath it is. What actually changes the conversation is the framework wrapped around it—the rails that make sure it asks for the right information, organizes it correctly, and doesn't fill gaps with a guess.
That's what's built into the custom GPT inside Health Coach AI™: the context framework, the rails, the structure, the sequencing, and the ability to connect data from health devices and apps outside the AI itself—so you're not starting from a blank box hoping you ask it the right way. And if you'd rather build that same framework into an AI of your own choosing, that's exactly what I teach too: how to structure the context, the instructions, and the device connections so any AI you use actually works the way you need it to.
Give sophisticated AI a shallow question and you'll still get a shallow answer. Give it a carefully organized longitudinal health picture, wrapped in the right framework, and you're having a very different conversation.
Health Coaching, Redefined™
I've spent more than 20 years in autoimmune patient advocacy, and I've watched patients struggle with the same problem again and again. It wasn't always a lack of information. Often, it was too much information without enough context. Another diet. Another supplement. Another practitioner. Another protocol. Another expert. Another study. Another app. Another tracker. Another social-media post telling you this is the missing piece.
Patients don't need another person—or another app—shouting another answer at them. We need better ways to organize what we know, recognize what we don't know, evaluate information, and participate intelligently in our own healthcare.
That's what AI can do for patients when it's used differently. Not as Dr. ChatGPT. Not as another symptom checker. But as a tool that helps you organize your history, research more intelligently, prepare for appointments, track changes, recognize patterns, and become a stronger advocate for yourself.
That's the philosophy behind Health Coach AI™ and the AI health-literacy education I'm building through Autoimmune 411™.
A Health Coach in Your Pocket
Because the future of AI in healthcare shouldn't belong only to healthcare systems, technology companies, and physicians. Patients belong in this conversation too. And if our doctors are learning how to use AI intelligently, it's time we do the same.
If you want to start learning how, that's exactly what the AI Health Literacy course inside Autoimmune 411 Academy™ is for—learning to use AI with your full health context, research smarter, and turn it into a real tool for self-advocacy.
Join the community Stop tracking and managing symptoms and understand your health in context.
Alice McDonnell is the founder of Hashimoto's 411® and Autoimmune 411™, and a 20+ year veteran autoimmune patient advocate. Through Autoimmune 411 Academy™, she teaches foundational autoimmune education, AI health literacy, research skills, and self-advocacy through the lens of context.
This article is for educational purposes only and isn't medical advice. AI-generated health information can be incomplete or inaccurate and should be independently verified. AI should support—not replace—appropriate professional medical care.
© 2026 Alice McDonnell | Autoimmune 411 LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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