AI in the Service Delivery, Prevention, Treatment at the Individual Level

Medical models. Artificial Intelligence provides explosive opportunities for health outcomes. Big data provides the opportunity to aggregate volumes of information around multiple scales for what constitutes a disease—from the DNA, proteins, and metabolites to cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and ecosystems. Developing models for drug interactions, risks and alerts, dosing and outcomes all hold great promise utilizing AI.

Monitoring. The capacity for 24-hour remote monitoring across the country has enormous potential for saving lives and money. This includes early detection of abnormalities, understanding baselines, tracking circumstances that would otherwise have required hospitalization and identifying bodily and mechanical malfunctions. The system is far from seamless and readily accessible, but holds great promise.

Health Records. AI has the capacity to use enormous sets of data to accurately collect maintain healthcare records for specific individuals. Basically, it is an individual’s longitudinal study of health related documentation, information and data. If an individual’s health records are available to healthcare providers, this could improve understanding of conditions, reduce the need for repetitive testing and diagnostics, improve care and reduce costs.

Warning: There are specific and well-known problems with huge databases of personal information. First, data security and personal identity protection must be built in from the beginning. These concerns have been writ large in travel security identification databases. This information cannot be the basis of denying insurance or care. Second, there needs to be the capacity to correct (across all data sets) mistakes that can occur, be they malicious or benign. Third, coverage and access must be available to every individual regardless of location, economic stature or use of healthcare. The big business of Big Data has to be brought into service of healthcare.

Currently AI data volume is far more advanced than the applications in medicine. We are at the very beginning of creating meaningful models which are well integrated into medical knowledge. RDA is helping researchers in all of these areas integrate AI capacity with current medical knowledge and health outcomes.