AI stakeholders in the Boston area may be headed to a half-day event at the upcoming Connected Health Conference on Oct. 16th titled Getting Real With AI.
For a preview of what attendees will hear, Mike Miliard at HealthcareIT News recently sat down with one of the speakers, American Medical Association Board Chair Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, for his take on the promise and challenges of AI across healthcare sector.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Ehrenfeld is clearly an optimist about AI in healthcare, noting in broad terms that “it's an opportunity for technology to become an asset, not a burden to practice, and put us in a position that can help advance our efforts to improve the health of the nation.”
Also not surprising is the fact that Ehrenfeld views AI not as a potential threat to physicians but a potentially very valuable ally. “(T)he goal,” he says specifically, “is not to replace any individual or group of individuals or physicians or members of the healthcare team – but rather to bring technology into our workflows and clinical environments in a way that is helpful in enhancing the capability of physicians and other healthcare workers. And how machine learning can become a more effective force working on problems, whether it's detecting disease, keeping patients healthy or setting up systems that can enable more effective care delivery.”
To that end, he points to the importance of developers bringing physicians into the design process early, citing as a cautionary tale the longstanding and often loud laments from physicians about the usability of EHRs.
As for how AI might best serve healthcare, Ehrenfeld gives the popular nod to potential improvements in diagnostic capabilities and image recognition, but he also expects “there will be tremendous opportunities to use AI to rethink how we engage patients in their own health and in patients to take ownership and control of their health in ways that today don't really happen in a very natural way with our sort of encounter-based care system, where the focus is often on illness rather than promoting health.”
On a practical level, Ehrenfeld hopes AI will also help healthcare provides “reimagine the work” of being a doctor. “I cannot tell you how frustrating it is, every time I'm taking care of patients, when I find myself doing things, interacting with systems, where I know there should be automated solutions that can make that busy clerical work go away,” he explains. “Whether that's finding information that's buried in an EMR, or transcribing information into electronic systems, there are obvious places the tools can, again, easily help clinicians make technology an asset, not a burden. And there's a lot of promise for what AI can offer.”
All things considered, Ehrenfeld says he’s “very optimistic that technology can continue to support physicians and all healthcare workers to elevate all of our abilities to care for patients. We have seen some instances where the technologies have not lived up to the hype . . .”
But AI, he believes, will not be one of those instances.