The Business Reality of Healthcare AI

BY KIM BELLARD I was at the barbershop the other day and overheard one barber talking with his senior citizen customer about when – not if – robot AIs would become barbers. I kid you not. Now, I don’t usually expect to heard conversations about technology at the barber, but it illustrates that I think we are at the point with AI that we were with the Internet in the late ‘90’s/early ‘00s: people’s lives were just starting to change because of it, new companies were jumping in with ideas about how to use it, and existing companies knew they were going to have to figure out ways to incorporate it if they wanted to survive. Lots of missteps and false starts, but clearly a tidal wave that could only be ignored at one’s own risk. So now it is with AI. I’ve been pleased that healthcare has been paying attention, probably sooner than it acknowledged the Internet. Every day, it seems, there are new developments about how various kinds of AI are showing usefulness/potential usefulness in healthcare, in a wide variety of ways.  There’s lots of informed discussions about how it will be best used and where the limits will be, but as a long-time observer of our healthcare system, I think we’re not talking enough about two crucial questions. Namely: Who will get paid? Who will get sued? Now, let me clarify that these are less unclear in some cases than others.  e.g., when AI assists in drug discovery, pharma can produce more drugs and make mo...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Tech Healthcare AI healthcare delivery Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs