Left to right, MedCity News Editor-in-Chief Arundhati Parmar moderates a panel discussion on “AI Maturing During Covid” with Cigna’s Senior Vice President and Global Head of Strategy and Business Development Tom Richards; Perspectum CEO Rajarshi Banerjee; Sarah Friedewald Ph.D., Vice Chairman of Radiology Surgery and Director of Breast Imaging at Northwestern Medicine; David Rhew, Microsoft Global Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Healthcare.
The surge in telehealth use at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic drew a lot of attention, and for good reason. But another technological revolution could also gain traction in healthcare, where AI hype is giving way to a growing number of real-world applications.
“DDuring the pandemic, we’ve all seen an explosion in the adoption of virtual health,” said David Rhew, Microsoft’s global chief medical officer and vice president of healthcare. MedCity INVEST in Chicago Tuesday. “But during that time, we’ve also seen a lot of highly innovative ways to use AI to improve decision-making, allow us to become more predictive, and improve clinical workflow,” Rhew said on a panel discussing AI adoption.
Others on the panel — moderated by MedCity News editor-in-chief Arundhati Parmar — agreed.
AI is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, and it’s not something out of science fiction, where robots replace people — or, more specifically, doctors. Instead, AI and machine learning are growing into a more dynamic, supportive role that can help healthcare providers improve patient outcomes and reduce the workload of clinical staff.
Rajarshi Banerjee, chief executive of Oxford, UK-based Perspectum, said: “We have developed AI decision support tools to help diagnose patients with various diseases, whether it’s liver disease or Covid.”
It’s not about whether AI has a place in healthcare, but what its capabilities will be, panelists said. “WWith that in mind, we should configure how we want to use AI rather than against it,” Banerjee said.
There are increasing applications of AI in healthcare, including symptom checkers. In particular, Tom Richards, senior vice president and global head of strategy and business development at Cigna, noted that his company has Invest in Buoy Health in 2020“We worked with them to develop a symptom checker for Covid,” he said.
AI-powered symptom checkers have been rapidly developed and deployed, and have been used by hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom found they did not need immediate medical attention. “It adds tremendous value,” Richards said. For those who do need medical care, they triage to make sure they get the right care, he added.
Research is also underway to see if artificial intelligence can more effectively use mammography to screen for breast cancer, explained Dr. Sarah Friedewald, vice president of radiology operations and director of breast imaging at Northwestern Medicine.
“One of the biggest criticisms of mammography is the low sensitivity and the anxiety associated with having to come back for additional imaging that might not end up being cancer,” Friedwald said. get screened because they don’t want to experience that anxiety. “
But it’s not just direct clinical applications that AI can improve healthcare. It’s also being used to help with more mundane administrative tasks to ease those burdens and free up more time for face-to-face doctor-patient interactions.
“Removing unnecessary waste from the system, including administrative tasks that don’t need to be done or could be done more efficiently, is definitely an important use case,” Richards said.
He noted that Cigna uses artificial intelligence to process millions of prior authorizations, most of which are automatically approved.
No matter what AI is used today or tomorrow, panelists highlighted the complementary role that technology can play to help improve patient outcomes and reduce workloads for already stretched-out healthcare providers.
“It’s taking a load off some people,” Richards said.
