5 Great Healthcare Solutions To Make You Feel Better About AI

We’re in a moment right now, a moment of what investors call FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) around AI. Or maybe it’s more like fear and loathing. It’s something a bit more fundamental than investment jitters. Whether it’s a boom or a bubble, humans are becoming worried that AI will get too good at what it does, and cause any number of imbalances for which we are just not prepared.

But let’s take a look at the positive side, in actual improvements coming to the world of healthcare, where AI has been so instrumental in saving lives. Not just a few lives. In nearly all aspects of a complex system, AI has been helping clinicians to move the ball forward, treat patients with more care, and universalize the advantages of having Western medicine at your fingertips.

Thoughts from Silicon Valley

At the Next Endeavor event Sept. 14-15, in Mountain View, California, which Imagination in Action and partners put on (disclaimer: I help to run these events), Caty Byerly Rezendes interviewed Hippocratic AI cofounder and CEO Munjal Shah about some of these brilliant move-markers that we’ve seen in the healthcare sector. But the two started out talking about safety.

“There’s a lot of talk around AI right now, and safety, and you think of medical and healthcare as, you know, the sacred space,” Rezendes said. “So how do you actually build AI that’s safe enough for the healthcare space?”

In response, Shah told the story: of hiring 7,000 US licensed clinicians to look after the AI’s work in a telemedicine trial.

“(They were asked) to call the AI, act as a patient, mark every error it made,” he said. “One out of 50 times, they got a human nurse on the other line. and they marked the errors they made. We did not ship till we were safer than a human nurse.”

The whole thing, he said, involved some 280 million patient interactions.

From the Top

Shah also told another story, of getting buy-in for this abundantly safe system.