What Does Modern Healthcare Look Like In The Age Of AI?

Dan Riskin, MD, MBA, FACS, is Clinical Professor of Surgery at Stanford University and CEO and Founder of Verantos.

I met her in the intensive care unit, after the damage was done. Years earlier, a heart murmur had been noted at a routine visit. It went into the doctor’s note and nowhere else. She changed care providers, the note didn’t follow, and the murmur was forgotten until she arrived in the emergency department unable to breathe. She needed emergency heart surgery for a problem that could have been safely fixed years earlier.

That isn’t uncommon in healthcare today. A patient can receive a gene therapy that was science fiction a decade ago while their referral to a specialist travels by fax. The treatments are extraordinary. The system around them has not kept up. So, it is fair to ask: In the age of AI, what should modern healthcare look like?

I received my first AI grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2010 and filed my first AI patent applications in 2011, back when only the most technically oriented doctors had heard of AI. In 2012, I wrote in Forbes that healthcare has a revolution roughly every 50 years, including public health in the 1870s, penicillin and effective medications in the 1920s, and evidence-based medicine in the 1970s. I wrote that the next revolution would occur in the 2020s, built on newly available electronic data, rapidly improving AI technology and increasingly available compute power. Those enabling technologies have since matured.

Why rewrite the standard of care? Because the evidence behind the current approach has limits. A clinical trial can show that a treatment is safe and works in general. It cannot say which of more than 200 approved options for high blood pressure or more than 150 for diabetes is best for a specific patient. So, doctors reach for what seemed to work on the last patient.

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