Becker's Hospital Review

28 Executive Briefing Sponsored by: T oday, tools of artificial intelligence are primarily in the hands of data scientists and developers. However, the era of AI exclusivity in healthcare is waning. As advances in technology make designing and using AI systems less complex and more citizen-friendly, clinicians and hospital administrators are gaining new and increasing opportunities to engage with data analytics. Becker's Hospital Review caught up with Elena Bonfiglioli, Microsoft's senior director of health and life sciences for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Tom Lawry, Microsoft's director of worldwide health, about opportunities and challenges for artificial intelligence in healthcare over the next three to five years. Note: Responses are lightly edited for brevity and clarity. Question: First off, what does it mean to democratize artificial intelligence in healthcare, and what does that process look like? Elena Bonfiglioli: Democratizing AI means empowering every person in an organization with systems of intelligence to provide better care for patients, better access to the right data at the right time for the right people, and to overall provide a better healthcare experience and better outcomes. We talk about democratization of AI because we believe AI solutions should not be limited to a few key players, but the underlying technology should be integrated and infused into every application and service — into the very infrastructure of healthcare — and made available to every provider. This is really an important philosophical and technological approach to health reform. That is the way in which we can enable everybody to change how they interact with the surrounding environment as that environment increasingly becomes an ambient computing environment, which we call the intelligent edge. AI solutions will not replace clinicians, but they can augment their capabilities to make them more productive and improve patient care. Tom Lawry: AI is used to automate and make decision- making better across clinical and operational processes. Applying that definition to healthcare, democratizing AI is about making the power of AI available to everyone in the care process. Democratization is moving from this concept of using intelligence to improve patient care to actually living and breathing AI by putting it in the hands of anyone and everyone in the organization. Q: What is required to truly make AI accessible and meaningful to everyone in the healthcare system, beyond data scientists? What are some things Microsoft partners are already doing with AI in healthcare? EB: In short, three elements are required to democratize AI: necessary skills, governance and an interoperable ecosystem. First, we need to democratize skills related to AI, including what it takes to code and design algorithms. If these skills are not pervasive, then we don't have enough developers coding for these solutions. Also, we need to consider what skills are necessary in health professionals who need to be able to use these solutions every day. The experience between the machine and human needs to be simplified and more intuitive and user-friendly. Second is governance. We need to be sure AI are understood and trusted and that we make the governance of those guiding algorithms ethical, open, transparent, and have no risk of harming humans. Governance makes sure the solutions we trust and the solutions we know are the solutions we use. Finally, we need to ensure these systems are fundamentally interoperable, meaning these machines and systems can connect irrespective of vendor. If we are to infuse intelligence into every agent, application, service and infrastructure, we need to have a need to have IT environment developing health solutions that can work together. It cannot be one company doing it all; it needs to be a new AI economy and set of services. Many of Microsoft's partners are using AI in interesting ways to augment physician's skills and work alongside them, rather than replace them. For example, AI tools help delineate tumors in shorter time and with highest precision that physicians alone cannot. Microsoft researchers in Cambridge developed an AI solution called InnerEye that creates a 3-D model of a tumor from a CT scan, which helps radiation oncologists prepare treatments and deliver better care to cancer patients. TL: Democratizing AI in healthcare organizations is gated by three things: old processes for how to do analytics, old data and old-world thinking by traditional-minded leadership. Increasingly we are seeing tools to drive advanced analytics and AI to higher levels, but a key challenge is getting healthcare leaders to understand how to embrace and use AI. Consider the process for using analytics in hospitals today. If someone wants to gain better knowledge through analytics, he or she has to meet with informaticists, data scientists and analysts who have the necessary tools and skills. Basically, every analytics project AI for the Everyman — 2 Leading Microsoft Directors Demystify AI's Future in Healthcare By Brooke Murphy

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