Why Healthcare Artificial Intelligence Requires the Human Touch

Artificial intelligence isn’t a whole solution in and of itself. But when designed with the capable hands of medical professionals, the technology can radically transform care delivery, from improving early detection of abnormalities in imagining scans to extracting important health information from unstructured text within clinical notes. With patient safety a major focal point of healthcare, AI must collaborate with the human experience and intuition to create "augmented intelligence." Augmented Intelligence integrates technology and clinical awareness to arrive at more informed decisions and improve how care is delivered. Understanding the proper relationship between AI and users will be integral to allowing emerging powerful technology to be applied in the right way to achieve optimal results. Access to large volumes of data is critical to precise AI applications, and as data dictates what an algorithm learns about its environment, access to representative data for training these systems becomes vital. Healthcare AI must be able to benefit a diverse patient population, so a limited training data set can prove detrimental to its effectiveness. In this fireside chat with Concord Technologies Chief Technology Officer Christopher Larkin, we will discuss how the human element has become a key component to developing truly powerful forms of healthcare AI. We will also touch on the obstacles in the way of future applications, considering the need for better AI training data to develop algorithms that can benefit the greatest number of lives.