"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

So observed Lonnie Rae Kurlander, co-founder and CEO of Medal, a data extraction provider, in a recent interview for HealthcareIT News.

Speaking about the voluminous amounts of health data providers increasingly have to sift through, Kurlander noted that unwieldy amounts of patient information can be tamed with artificial intelligence, benefiting physicians and patients alike by reducing workloads and speeding time to relevant information.

"I was serving a patient in the ICU who was in a coma because we couldn't get his patient info in a timely manner," Kurlander recounted. "If I'm able to quickly find the hints, the clues, maybe the prior diagnosis is already there. Maybe there were similar incidents before that could have helped us."

Kurlander sees Medal's approach as a collaborative tool more than a road to replacing physicians, citing Elon Musk's success in meeting car manufacturing goals at Tesla by starting a second production line in the factory parking lot staffed entirely by humans: "He said his biggest mistake was over automating.”

As she sees things, computer augmentation isn't ever supposed to replace a physician; instead, it has the great potential to "put power in hands of power users of health care.” She notes that in ancient games like chess or go, even a novice user "playing with (computer) assistance will win every time.”

Similarly, Andy McMurry, Medal's co-founder and chief innovation officer, says machine learning can do the reading and assign context to tell the doctor about the patient's most relevant condition

He noted that physicians spend too much time as "fancy store clerks" who enter and sift through massive amounts of data. The benefit of having all the data is lost through due to the sheer volume; AI-driven software like Medal can help assign context and meaning to it for practitioners, bringing them back to the "joy of delivering medicine."

His mantra? "A wealth of information creates poverty of attention."

Using machine learning and AI to help "read through the chaff," said McMurry, takes over for physicians in areas that they shouldn't be and aren't even really supposed to be doing. This can lead to a greater range of potential reached by professionals in healthcare, not to say improved outcomes and money saved.