With artificial intelligence and augmented reality popping up around every corner in healthcare, players in the industry are beginning to reflect on how tech innovation in healthcare works, where it works, and whether these technologies themselves actually work.
At The Economist’s Healthcare Forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts this week, experts sat down to talk about the future of healthcare innovation for the industry, providers, and patients.
Technology has already changed the face of healthcare, Carla Leibowitz, head of corporate development at Arterys, a company that specializes in combining cloud computing and AI in the medical imaging space, said. For AI specifically, clinical trials and diagnostics are some examples of areas in which AI has already made a big impact.
But while some of the technologies are able to accomplish what humans haven’t been able to do before, Leibowitz said we need to put on the brakes on all of the hype surrounding it.
“Even though we can come up with a machine learning model or you can run drug discoveries faster, you still need to generate that evidence [of] how can we accelerate that and not hurt patients,” Leibowitz said.
As tech giants like Amazon and Google enter the healthcare field there is a lot of speculation around on what is next for the industry. Leibowitz cautioned there is some tech arrogance — and technology can’t replace clinicians.
“Just because you can do it, is there a need for it?” Rajeev Shah, managing director and portfolio manager at RA Capital Management, said.
Instead, many hospitals are using the technologies to help hospital staff and clinicians manage their routines instead of giving the care directly.
“What we are finding is the value of AI is not medical care itself but everything surrounding that care,” Daniel Barchi, senior vice-president and chief information officer at NewYork-Presbyterian, said.
He gave the example of a platform that aims to help doctors safely discharge patients. This technology gives clinicians reminders about normal lengths of stays for certain conditions and asks doctors if they want their patients to have different consultations, such as physical therapy. The idea is to give reminders to busy doctors, while also keeping the costs down.
The technologies are also helping physicians discharge patients sooner. For example, if a doctor wants to monitor a heart condition, instead of making the patient stay in the hospital for multiple days, the clinician could send the patient home with a remote monitor.
But even with technologies designed to reduce care teams' burdens, sometimes onboarding the clinicians can be one of the biggest struggles. Samuel Nussbaum, a fellow at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at USC, said that in the early days of telemedicine, when he was working with American Well to provide telemedicine services, doctors found that the technology interfered with their workflow and didn’t want to take evening calls.
Patients are another key stakeholder in the development of these tools, said Lesley Solomon, senior vice president and chief innovation officer at Dana Faber Cancer Institute. When Dana Faber was looking to develop new tools for patients, they went right to the patient family advisory council to talk about what they felt the need was.
The patients said they wanted an app that educated people about their cancers. Solomon said it isn’t an app that she would have necessarily come up with, or even chosen, but it was what made sense for the patients.
“What is the problem [patients] are facing and how can we innovate around that challenge?” Soloman asked.
Beyond the hype and buzzwords, medical technology is transforming healthcare. But industry players urge that it needs to be implemented thoughtfully with input from clinicians and patients.
"I think we are going to see the model [for innovation] evolve, but it is going to take time," Nussbaum said.
