There’s been plenty of hype surrounding the promise of AI in healthcare. But success following implementation? Not so much.
That’s according to a group of doctors and data scientists who recently published a commentary in BMJ Health & Care Informatics calling on hospitals to establish “organized and dedicated” clinical departments whose primary focus is the successful implementation of AI.
“Within academic medicine,” they argue, “algorithms are currently developed in silos by researchers interested in the intersection of healthcare and machine learning. This has led to a panoply of published models trained on health data, yet only a handful have been prospectively evaluated on patients.’’
In their view, the general “lack of clinical results is the byproduct of a lack of coherence, leadership and vision. Hence, unless we change course, we should expect that AI deployment in healthcare will progress much the way the EHR revolution did before it, that is, mainly based on corporate and administrative benefits without requiring any demonstrable improvements in processes or outcomes for our patients or ourselves.”
Given the range of challenges facing the implementation of AI in healthcare, the group says any department of AI’s primary focus should be on making healthcare organizations “AI Ready.”
Specifically, resulting “initiatives should lead to the development of models that will directly benefit the health of our patients, pioneer research that advances the field of clinical AI, focus on its integration into clinical workflows and foster educational programs and fellowships to ensure we are training current practitioners as well as the next generation of leaders in this field.”
Moreover, dedicated departments should be front and center when it comes to the implementation, utilization and enhancement of the infrastructures that underlie AI solutions.
“Central to this mission will be removing barriers to data access, and the proposed department would therefore assume partnered stewardship of the institution’s data as part of its mandate. While the role of information technology specialists in maintaining a health system’s computational infrastructure should not be subsumed, the department would be responsible for integration, research and production databases that can support its broader mission. By centralizing this role, we would finally overcome the chasms among ideas, development and effective deployment.”
In addition to managing the development and implementation of clinical AI, the group says the new, dedicated departments “will be instrumental as our country’s financial and regulatory environments shift to acknowledge and incorporate AI’s potential to improve care. . . Clinical AI departments will work to ensure that health systems are poised for safe implementations that are tailored to their specific patient populations, and that the necessary data analytics will be readily available for negotiating with payers.”
Finally, the departments will also be responsible for spearheading the development of best practice guidelines for hospitals as implementation spreads.