The rapid development of the coronavirus vaccines is likely the biggest success story of the year gone by, not to mention of many years previous. But in the U.S and numerous other countries, getting the vaccine off the production lines and into people’s arms hasn’t gone quite so smoothly.
Recently, at Forbes, tech writer and start-up consultant Tom Taulli asked a number of tech executives how AI could help, and not surprisingly there were quite a few different ideas.
For example, said Aditya Sriram, the AI Portfolio Lead and CoE Program Manager at ibi, a tech platform innovator, the testing of the vaccine has been on relatively small sample populations, and with possible adverse effects becoming more apparent as use of the vaccine spreads, “AI can provide insights on patients that are likely to react to the vaccination, given their medical history and demographics information.”
Ted Kwartler, VP of Trusted AI at DataRobot, pointed to the range of distribution settings managers of the vaccine will encounter. For example, he asked, “Within a state, what locations and subpopulations should be allocated vaccines in what order? AI-augmented simulations can, at a granular level, factor in hundreds of inputs, like mobility data, hospital utilization, and current infection rates, to forecast thousands of possible futures for dozens of locations within a state. This enables decision-makers to send vaccines to those communities and people with the greatest need right when it helps the most.”
Similarly, Chris Hale, founder and CEO of Kountable, a platform focused on ensuring the integrity and security of data supporting numerous business practices and governance, noted the need for successful government-private partnerships that align the “data acquisition and utilization process with the data sovereignty of the individual patient. This is key to a successful government-private partnership that will have the staying power to deliver over time by building trust in the US population. In addition, the partnership would need to consider interoperability across federal and state data governance and health care portability policies.”
More directly from the consumer perspective, Nigel Duffy, Global AI Leader at the business consultancy Ernst & Young Global Limited, said “AI could be used to target messages and communications to those eligible to receive a vaccine. These messages could be customized by AI in content, form, and medium to motivate citizens to take the vaccine by highlighting the personal benefits to them . . . and by countering any misconceptions about the risks associated with the vaccine . . . .”
As Arijit Sengupta, founder and CEO of AI platform developerAible, summed up the potential for AI to help, "Humans don’t have the capacity to consider thousands of competing and evolving factors. This is precisely what AI does best—that is, complex scenario planning and hypothesis testing that’s flexible enough to adjust quickly to new information so that decisions can be made based on the best available evidence.”