Leadership Forum: The Creative Destruction of Healthcare
Chief Digital Officer, Partners Healthcare
How can the healthcare system best accommodate AI? Leaders from the public and private sector weigh in.
Atil Guwande, recently MY COLLEAGUE, BEST-SELLING AUTHOR wrote an article for the New Yorker titled, “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers.” In it, he points to a number of workflowrelated issues that are problematic for physicians. Some come down to fragmented workflows due to partial digitization, and some are associated with the fact that the computer feels like it’s ‘in the way’ between the patient and the provider. The thing I hear from clinicians again and again is that between login screens and access to different systems, it takes way too many clicks. Clearly, there are opportunities for improvement.
When it comes to AI in healthcare, some practical applications are already in use. A dermatologist is now equal to a computer in terms of interpreting certain kinds of moles for melanoma; images of the back of the retina can be processed by AI to identify retinopathy in patients with diabetes; and a machine can now interpret and diagnose a mammogram better than a human pathologist.
AI can even save lives: If an 86-year-old patient comes in complaining of dizziness and gets a CAT scan on a Thursday indicating a 96 per cent chance that she will have a stroke within hours or days, an algorithm can place her results at the very front of the line to be dealt with immediately — instead of a week or more. For the radiologist and her workflow, nothing changes — she still grabs the next film in the queue; but regardless of when the test was done, the AI literally reorganizes the stack.
All of these new tools are augmenting, not replacing what clinicians do, and they are creating a new currency: data. The secondary use of healthcare data is becoming incredibly useful to biotech, to pharma and to researchers. Increasingly, people accept that all of the digital information being collected will be shared between hospitals and other enterprises.
In the past, quality and cost were the key value-drivers for patients, but we need to add digital innovation to that list. People want access to care, and they want it online. They want a caring team around them at all times. Even if the cardiologist herself isn’t the one reaching out digitally to them, somebody can — a care navigator or other member of the team.
Relationship management is going to change dramatically. Imagine that a health team member enters a phone number and the AI calls up the patient’s record. Immediately, he will see that the patient prefers to be called Jenny; that she is scared of hospitals; and that he shouldn’t book her on a Tuesday, because she never shows up on a Tuesday. This frees the agent up to figure out, ‘What else can I do for Jenny today?’ These sort of transactional systems have been used in other industries to provide a better customer experience, and the time has come to adopt them in healthcare.