What do you get when you put AI and the cloud together?
UCLA Health is about to find out, as it recently announced a move to deploy cloud computing services, powered by artificial intelligence, to advance precision medicine research and improve patient care.
UCLA’s hope is that the cloud computing services, provided by Microsoft, will enable UCLA Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine to synthesize vast amounts of clinical data and increase collaboration among researchers.
“Our data capabilities with Microsoft Azure will bring more medical discoveries and effective therapies to patients faster,” said Michael Pfeffer, MD, assistant vice chancellor and chief information officer for UCLA Health Sciences, in a statement. “The integration of information from structured data, like lab results and medication information, with unstructured data, like documentation, genomics and medical images, creates an incredibly powerful big-data learning platform for discovery.”
Embedded with AI and machine learning, UCLA researchers will use the cloud computing tools to analyze multiple sources of data more efficiently, while also quickly generating insights for physicians and researchers to use, thus accelerating medical discovery.
“Analyzing large data sets to make scientific discoveries is a race against time. Using machine learning to analyze a combination of clinical and genomics data can provide critical insights, but doing so with a traditional computing infrastructure can require significant processing time,” said Mohammed Mahbouba, MD, chief data officer for UCLA Health Sciences. “Azure enables us to quickly deploy and scale high-performance computing environments that can reduce the required processing time — sometimes from months to days — to make discoveries.”
In 2017, the health system launched the UCLA Institute for Precision Health to bring together faculty from multiple disciplines and make large-scale genetic and genomic data actionable for patient care.The new software will allow UCLA to utilize predictive analytics to help improve disease prevention efforts.
“By connecting health data and systems in the cloud in an interoperable way, we're excited we can help advance health care data for more efficient and personalized care,” said Peter Lee, corporate vice president, Microsoft Healthcare.