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Medical Innovation
Tomorrow’s Cure: The future of patient-centered AI
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This episode of "Tomorrow's Cure" explores how AI and automation can be harnessed for healthcare. We hear from Ravi Bapna, Ph.D., the Curtis L. Carlson Chair Professor in Business Analytics and Information Systems at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, and Anjali Bhagra, M.D., a clinical investigative internist at Mayo Clinic, as they discuss how we are adding these tools to our toolbox to help create scalable solutions to age-old problems.
AI is integrated into much of healthcare, and that integration prioritizes how researchers enable more focus on the patient. Tools like ambient AI for recording patient conversations help free up administrative time to physicians and ultimately patients. "I give my full attention to my patients when I'm in the room with them, without being distracted. I think that ... has allowed me to be more human, more present, more in tune with patients' emotions," says Dr. Bhagra.
The episode also dives into the buckets of traditional AI and predictive AI. Complex care often brings with it consults from many physicians and vast medical records. AI can accumulate and analyze all that data in comparison to similar records, helping to map trends or new opportunities for understanding.
The guests agree there is much more to learn. "We are still harnessing only a very, very small fraction of the data we generate as a society," Bapna says.
For both researchers, the human being remains centered in this conversation and much of their work is focused on freeing up scarce resources, which in this case is physicians' time. From there, the core questions teams are approaching are how to augment human capacity and knowledge. That also calls for an understanding of automation and how to align people and processes.
The researchers talk with host Cathy Wurzer about society's adaptation to digital life and how innovations such as patient records and test results are now available through new technologies like apps. They discuss how this access to information can help patients be proactive and lead to better communication with their physician.
Listen to the latest episode of "Tomorrow's Cure" wherever you get your podcasts. You can explore the full library of episodes and guests on the show's page.
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