AI In Healthcare: What’s To Be Done About Data?

The widespread deployment of AI in U.S. healthcare will succeed only with the establishment of a national infrastructure for open health data. The quality of any AI application is highly dependent on the data feeding its model. The U.S. healthcare system, a prime candidate for AI applications, is still starved for comprehensive and representative real-world health data that is standardized, proactively shared, and easily accessible. There is no lack of enthusiasm for the potential beneficial impact of AI on the practice of medicine, the health of patients, and the productivity of the healthcare sector. For example, the medical publisher NEJM Group, recently announced NEJM AI, a new journal that will “identify and evaluate state-of-the-art applications of artificial intelligence to clinical medicine.” The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) itself started a series of articles on “AI in Medicine,” stating that “medicine stands out as one in which there is tremendous potential” for AI along with “equally substantial challenges.”