Artificial intelligence (AI) was a hot topic in 2023, and there’s no sign of it slowing down in the next year.
Healthcare Brew spoke to leaders at health tech companies to see what’s coming down the pike for AI in 2024. Don’t worry, the technology isn’t likely to replace physicians anytime soon.
Kalie Dove-Maguire, clinical specialist senior director at Carbon Health
This year, San Francisco-based Carbon Health integrated an AI-enabled notes assistant into its electronic health records. The AI can generate a visit summary based on the patient-provider conversation, Healthcare Brew previously reported.
Dove-Maguire, who also practices emergency medicine at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, said she hopes to see more AI innovations that automate administrative tasks and alleviate cognitive burden for clinicians.
“You will have to pry my AI scribe from my hands […] Those sorts of tools just make that a thing of the past because I would love to review a draft rather than anything else,” Dove-Maguire said.
In the coming years, AI is expected to move into the driver’s seat, like suggesting treatments in low-risk settings or assisting with specialist referrals, Dove-Maguire said. Already, ChatGPT has shown its potential to help providers choose the appropriate screening test for a patient with breast pain, Healthcare Brew previously reported.
If the healthcare industry wants wider adoption of AI tools, though, it will need to address the privacy and security concerns that come with the technology, Dove-Maguire added.
“One of my colleagues used this term ‘Cambrian age of technology in medicine,’ and it very much feels like that,” Dove-Maguire said. “In 2024, we’re actually going to see a lot of those [AI tools] rise to the top and some others that’ll get filtered out just by being in the ether and actually being used.”
Eric Prugh, chief product officer at Authenticx
The Indianapolis-based software company uses AI to help insurance companies and medical organizations extract and analyze data from their call centers.
For Prugh, AI can help healthcare professionals “be more human” by automating admin tasks or identifying areas to improve bureaucratic processes.
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“There’s so much complexity to the healthcare system, and ultimately, what you’re asking everyone in the industry to do is to keep tabs on everything—on all the processes, on all the controls, on all the compliance needs, on all the sorts of security and privacy things that are factored into that,” Prugh said.
In 2024, the healthcare industry may need to be more pragmatic on how it deploys expensive large language model tools, but at the same time, the technology has the potential to create new AI-focused jobs, Prugh said.
“We have data scientists that are trying to figure out how to engineer how they work with tools like GPT or large language models—which are really a broad category—to get the answers that we need to synthesize the right insights to our clients in healthcare,” Prugh said. “I’m starting to see people trying to develop best practices, and that’s going to turn into a whole set of careers.”
Lisa Moneymaker, chief technology officer and chief product officer at Saama
The Bay Area-based software development company has used its AI-enabled platform to assist pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and AstraZeneca manage clinical trial data.
This year, the interest in AI healthcare initiatives was “through the roof,” Moneymaker said. But for these AI tools to be effective in 2024 and the coming years, healthcare leaders will need to change their models to adapt to the technology, Moneymaker added.
“If you just take a shiny widget and insert it into your existing process, and change nothing else, you will see no difference. You will see no improved process. You’re probably going to see it get worse because now you’ve inserted more cost of some sort,” Moneymaker said. “Keeping those pieces in mind will allow us as we move into 2024 to say, ‘OK, my mind got blown in 2023 by what’s possible. Now what would it mean to take what’s possible and move it to reality?’”