Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb will headline the Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Diagnostics Conference.
Artificial intelligence in healthcare can be a business benefit for leaders in hospitals and physician offices who want to improve patient care and increase their revenues through more efficient processes.
At its core, AI comprises digital algorithms that evolve based on growing datasets and mistakes made by the software that it subsequently learns from. Clinical decision-makers should take advantage of the following four prominent AI trends in healthcare.
There is a common misconception that once AI becomes embedded in healthcare processes, it will take away human jobs. That scenario is unlikely to occur, however, because AI’s true role is to aggregate and analyze reams of data. That task is difficult for humans, so AI will be a welcome partner in clinical decision-making.
This stance is supported by Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and now a board member at Pfizer and Illumina. He is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy firm.
Gottlieb will headline the Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Diagnostics (AIHD) Conference on May 10-11 in San Jose, Calif., which is presented by the Precision Medicine Institute. The event will bring together executives from AI companies, hospitals, and diagnostics providers to discuss the state of artificial intelligence in healthcare and related business strategies.
AIHD’s speaker podium will also feature several other accomplished thought leaders in healthcare AI, including former HHS Deputy Chief of Staff Paul Mango, who was a key strategist for the White House’s Project Warp Speed, which focused on rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines.
“Once you can start to integrate clinical information with information from digital pathology, with information from sequencing, with information drawn from proteomic tests, you're going to be able develop a lot more insight into disease,” Gottlieb said during a 2021 webcast hosted by Proscia, an AI pathology software vendor.
Adoption of digital pathology sped up during the COVID-19 pandemic, and AI has been quick to jump on that progress. In Europe and the U.S., the first AI-powered products that automate digital pathology image analysis for diagnosis are obtaining regulatory clearance.
Meanwhile, money is flowing into AI research related to digital pathology. One example: In December 2021, Australian AI company Harrison.ai announced that it had raised $97 million from multiple sources, including from clinical pathology company Sonic Healthcare. Part of the funding will help Harrison.ai and Sonic develop new AI tools for pathology.
In hospitals that deal with high volumes of patients or in communities that don’t have access to as many physicians or nurses as needed, AI may be able to step in.
Healthcare could use AI-powered bots to evaluate patients before they see a human clinician, said AI expert Ajit Singh, PhD. He is general partner at Artiman Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage technology investments, and adjunct professor at Stanford School of Medicine.
“What if there was … an AI bot that was able to do triage?” asked Singh, who will deliver a keynote at the AIHD Conference. “That would go a long way in solving the access problem by reducing non-productive waiting to reach a clinician.”
Expect to see a range of AI-powered products to streamline revenue cycle management (RCM) functions that are critical to the financial well-being of healthcare organizations.
AI can automate labor-intensive functions in coding, billing, claims appeals, and collections, all of which will reduce RCM costs and may increase the total amount of revenue collected from the same number of claims.
Further, AI in various RCM functions may only need to manage a certain number of variables. For example, confirming a patient’s identity may need only 10 factors to be verified by software. It is easy to train AI-powered RCM tools to work with these criteria and develop accurate answers that help the business office.
Artificial intelligence in healthcare will open doors to greater efficiency for hospitals and physician offices.
Those leaders who want to say ahead of competitors would be wise to evaluate the AI offerings in the market and determine whether any of them help improve medical diagnostic processes and patient care.
For more information about the upcoming AIHD Conference, check out the roster of expert speakers and program agenda.
Scott Wallask is editorial director for the Precision Medicine Institute, which is producing the AIHD Conference.
The Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Diagnostics Conference, presented by the Precision Medical Institute, takes place May 10-11 in San Jose. At this event, AI leaders, innovators, and solution providers in healthcare and biotech will share how they use AI in real-world daily applications that support patient care.