How AI Is Transforming the Future of Healthcare

Anticipating emergency room visits before a patient feels sick and quickly identifying promising clinical trials to treat cancers are among the many benefits of artificial intelligence, according to The Business Council of Westchester’s recent seminar Healing Horizons: Navigating AI in Healthcare’s Transformative Technologies.

The September 9 event at Montefiore Einstein Advance Care in Elmsford was part of the BCW’s yearlong AI 360 Alliance, focusing on artificial intelligence’s impact on Westchester’s business sector.

Healing Horizons featured a presentation by Dr. Parsa Mirhaji, the director of the Center for Health Date Innovations at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center. Mirhaji explained how BCW Member Montefiore Einstein is leveraging the massive amounts of data it possesses to build artificial intelligence models that can learn, improvise solutions, and answer unanticipated questions based on the assimilation of data.

Mirhaji explained that contemporary healthcare information is fragmented, and a patient’s information is not shared broadly.

“Nothing is connected in our current healthcare system. We don’t have a patient-centered, precision medicine where if you see a doctor, they know about you and what brings you here and what is best for you now,” said Mirhaji. “That is what we think an artificial intelligence, if put to use properly, can accomplish.”

To that end, Mirhaji said that Montefiore Einstein is becoming a learning health system whereby every time a patient passes through its doors, the institution learns from that encounter and refines its care for that individual and others like that patient.

“The machine learns from its own operation, its own experience, to get better and better. That’s the holy grail of applicational AI in healthcare which we at Montefiore Einstein are after,” said Mirhaji.

Rather than replace physicians and health providers, AI will become a precision tool wielded by humans to provide better health outcomes, said Mirhaji. The AI tool will most benefit diagnostics, clinical decision-making, and health predictions, giving clinicians and hospital staff unprecedented insight into outcomes.

AI will also benefit the training of new healthcare professionals. AI can improve training, simulations, tutoring, and role playing, he said.

To ensure that the AI does not misdiagnose Montefiore Einstein’s core patient base in the New York City metropolitan region, the health network is developing and implementing its own algorithms based on New York populations, unlike algorithms developed in Silicon Valley that may be based on a different population.

As for predictions about AI becoming a threat to humanity, Mirhaji cautiously dismissed them.

“For a machine to be conscious enough to be able to really find itself opposed to human beings and have the will to somehow eradicate us—the Terminator paradigm—a machine must have many layers that they don’t. Unless someone goes out of their way to implement that for some reason, (AI) will never have the kind of consciousness and drive to be able to be dangerous to us,” said Mirhaji. “It doesn’t mean a group of human beings can’t set it up against another group of people and weaponize AI…but it is not going to be a conscious Terminator-kind of situation. The real danger of AI is that someone creates an economic model that makes a big part of our society jobless.”