January 23, 2025

Holistic Pulse

Healthcare is more important

8 experts on leveraging AI in healthcare

8 experts on leveraging AI in healthcare

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Editor’s note: This article includes insights from Healthcare Dive’s recent live event, “AI and the Future of Healthcare.” You can watch the full event here.

Healthcare organizations face a number of barriers to adopting artificial intelligence tools. Providers must address concerns from patients, while payers and other life science companies struggle with how to balance promises of efficiency with ethical concerns like biases.

They do it all on the promise that AI will automate rote tasks, cut down on medical spending and waste, free up clinicians to spend more time with patients and transform the healthcare industry.

But more than two years after generative AI became popular with the general public through ChatGPT, healthcare is still catching up on how to regulate, test and implement the tools, experts said during a panel hosted by Healthcare Dive on Nov. 19.

Here are tips from eight healthcare experts on what organizations should consider when implementing AI and how to develop standards and regulations. 

How providers can vet AI tools

The first step providers should take when deciding whether to integrate an AI tool is to assess the clinical setting it will be used in. Not every tool is appropriate for every task in the clinic, according to Sonya Makhni, medical director for the Mayo Clinic Platform.

“An AI algorithm that might be really good and appropriate for my clinical setting might not be as appropriate for another and vice versa,” Makhni said. “Health systems need to understand … what to look for, and they need to understand their patient population so they can make an informed decision on their own.”

Although providers must assess AI tools, they face hurdles analyzing them due to their sheer complexity because the algorithms and models can be difficult to understand, she added.

“Our workforce is strained as it is,” Makhni said. “We can’t really expect everyone to go get a master’s degree in data science or artificial intelligence to be able to interpret the solutions.”

To help solve this problem, providers should turn to public and private consortia — like the nonprofit Coalition for Health AI — for guiding principles when evaluating AI tools.

“We have learned a lot about what types of principles that solutions should adhere to,” Makhni said.” So, safety, fairness, usefulness, transparency, explainability, privacy, you know, all of these things we should use as a lens for when we look at AI solutions.”

Addressing patient concerns

Once providers decide to integrate AI tools, they face another potential stumbling block: their patients.

As AI tools become more popular, patients have expressed reservations about the technology being used at the doctor’s office. Last year, 60% of surveyed American adults told Pew Research they would be uncomfortable if their provider relied on AI for their medical care. 

To make patients more comfortable, Maulin Shah, chief medical information officer at health system Providence, said clinicians should emphasize that, right now, AI provides a purely supportive role.

“AI is really just, in a lot of ways, a better way of supporting and providing decision support to your doc[tor], so that they aren’t missing things or so they can be suggesting things,” Shah said.

Although AI tools have only just become popular with the general public, patients may feel better knowing that AI has existed in the medical field for a long time.

Aarti Ravikumar, chief medical information officer at Atlantic Health System, pointed to transformational tools such as the artificial pancreas, or the closed loop hybrid insulin pump, which has become a “game changer” for patients who are insulin-dependent.

“All of that work is being done using artificial intelligence algorithms,” Ravikumar said. “So we have AI tools that are embedded within our medical devices or within our electronic medical record, and have for a long time.”

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