Way up there on the Peak of Inflated Expectations in the Gartner Hype Cycle is that two-letter creature, AI. Artificial Intelligence has been invoked in multiple tech fields, and Microsoft in the US currently is running 30 second commercials about how AI is “making tomorrow today” but without much explanation as to how.
If AI’s current puffery makes you dizzy, long-time observer of the Healthcare Scene Anne Ziegler’s article in Hospital EMR and EHR might stabilize the whirlies. In direct and brief terms, she classifies the realities of healthcare AI adoption in three areas:
- Lack of Transparency. How does AI reach its conclusions in making ‘good decisions’? Sometimes the logic of the conclusion is obvious, but often it is not, and what you get is physician and clinician bypass–and suspicion.
- That Old Monkey Wrench Tossed into Existing Processes. It’s taken a long time for organizations to fully integrate their EHR inputs and documentation. Throwing in an AI implementation even in a limited sense may require more adjustments than the outcomes are worth.
- It’s Too, Tooooo Much Data. Healthcare organizations do not suffer from a paucity of data. AI feeds on data. Sounds like a good match, doesn’t it. Except that a lot of this data isn’t usable without filtering and mining, and that takes a lot of processing. The future may have more advanced data processing and indexing tech to do that, but right now even natural language processing to identify useful information is rare in the field.
Widespread AI use in healthcare is, despite the IBM Watson Health hype, a long way off. In healthcare, the rubber must meet the road of patient care and clinical practicality to be useful to us with Non-Artificial Intelligence. Problems We Need To Address Before Healthcare AI Becomes A Thing
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