How AI is Already Evolving, and Enabling Diverse Healthcare Improvements

Hospitals and health systems are using artificial intelligence to advance patient selection for clinical trials, avoid healthcare supply chain disruptions, uncover early-stage disease, decrease patient wait times – and those are just a few of the myriad AI use cases already in action, according to a virtual congressional briefing hosted this past week by Premier Inc.

Diversifying and standardizing data

Premier, Inc. is a digital transformation company that works with 4,350 U.S. hospitals and health systems and more than 300,000 other providers and organizations, according to its website. The company finds that hospital systems are currently looking to AI to support analyses of patient data and workflow optimization, according to Mason Ingram, director of payer, policy and government affairs.

In its Congressional advocacy road map announced in August, the company said it believes that while "AI can and should play a critical role in advancing healthcare and spurring innovation," it also believes "AI cannot and should not replace the practice of medicine."

However, connecting underserved patients to clinical trials is an area AI can support and refine, according to the company.

"The healthcare industry, in general, is continuously seeking high-quality data, but the data needs to be standardized, connected, representative of large, diverse communities and reflect the state of clinical practice in the general population," Ingram said.

Such data can lead to finding the most appropriate patients for real-world evidence and clinical trials, according to Denise Juliano, group vice president of life sciences.

"This structured and unstructured data and the use of AI, machine learning and natural language processing can supplement our work in research," she said.

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