AI Summit Recap: Dollars and Cents in AI and Health Tech
There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence has already changed the business world. But there are other areas where it has been utterly transformative. One of those areas is health and medicine. As part of the Information’s recent San Francisco AI Summit, reporter Natasha Mascarenhas sat down to discuss the current state of AI in healthcare with three luminaries whose work is synergistic:
- Ayman AlAbdallah, partner, Mubadala Capital
- Michael Mager, co-founder and CEO, Precision Neuroscience
- Mike Ng, co-founder and CEO, Ambience Healthcare
What does the market look like now?
Mascarenhas started off by asking Mike Ng of Ambience Healthcare, an AI operating system for healthcare organizations, what he’s seeing in the market in the post-ChatGPT world.
“I think where we are now is that the majority of health systems have come to the consensus that they’re going to use AI to automate documentation. The market is clearly already here,” he said.
Ayman AlAbdallah of Mubadala Capital chimed in with an investor’s point of view. First, he pointed out that AI in the biosciences has existed far longer than ChatGPT. “But unlike the internet where you can train chatbots, biological data has to be produced. That data is represented in different dimensions. It’s structured and unstructured medical records, imaging data and genomic data sets. That makes the adoption of AI even more important. And it continues to pull investor interest.”
Michael Mager of Precision Neuroscience, a brain–computer interface company, agreed with AlAbdallah, saying, “We’ll often implant multiple arrays on someone’s brain. The rate at which neuron activity occurs is at the millisecond threshold. We’re sampling these electrodes thousands of times per second. That means that we’re collecting 1 [billion] to 2 billion data points per minute per patient.…This is an amount of data that human beings can’t make sense of without the use of sophisticated AI-based software algorithms.”
The True Value of AI: It’s More Than Just Dollars
Sure, AI is a money- and time-saver across healthcare, but the goals for its use are loftier. AI can improve the quality of life for billions of people around the world.
AlAbdallah spoke of the importance of adopting technology and AI to improve the efficiency of healthcare services. “Twenty cents of every dollar spent in the U.S. is spent on healthcare,” he explained. “When a drug goes generic, we’re not always seeing the cost savings translate for consumers. Across the entire value chain, we’re seeing pockets where technology can drive efficiency and increase access to healthcare, ultimately driving down costs.”
Mager expressed that the humanitarian benefits also lead to economic benefits. He used the example of someone in their 20s who’s been in a car accident that left them paralyzed. They can no longer support themselves or their family. “When we think about controlling a computer with one’s thoughts, it’s not for fun,” he said. “It’s to allow people to operate Microsoft Office, Excel, PowerPoint and Word. If you can do that, you can rejoin the workforce.” And that leads to macro benefits. “Taking someone from being dependent to being able to have a job, pay taxes and support a family…the financial benefit over a lifetime is enormous.”
The Future of AI-Assisted Healthcare Is Already Here
Ng foresees the very near future of how AI can improve healthcare—and the statistics speak for themselves. “Eleven thousand new seniors are aging into Medicare every single day,” he said. “Combine that with a shortage of clinicians, and it’s not a question of whether healthcare wants AI. Healthcare needs AI.”
He sees AI as eventually saving more than time and money. “Rural Americans have a 40% greater likelihood of a preventable hospitalization. Half of those are attributed to lack of access to specialty care,” Ng said. “Can you imagine if we’re able to democratize the best medicine from our leading academic medical centers and make that available across the U.S. population? In the next couple of years, AI will go from efficiency to improving the quality of care.”
The Possibilities Are Already Becoming a Reality
From making drug access more equitable to allowing doctors to spend more time caring for patients to incredible advances in neurotech, AI is changing the healthcare industry in a way that promises to have a profoundly positive impact on humanity and the economy. After all, healthier people contribute to a healthier global economy.