Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to transform the health-care industry with clinical advances as well as operational changes. To make sure that AI applications are applied to improve the lives of patients and reduce the problems of health-care systems requires a collaborative effort from people who understand both the technology and the clinical environment it enters.

That premise is the organizing idea behind Cleveland Clinic's A.I. Summit for Healthcare Professionals, according to Rohit Chandra, PhD, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Chandra: The AI summit really tries to bring AI expertise and health-care expertise together in the same room. And the reason that's critical is we believe that AI has the potential to transform health care over time.

It requires a deep collaboration between technical expertise and health-care expertise. So our goal of the summit is to make sure we are giving people a space to bring their expertise together, to learn from each other, to challenge each other, to go after what is arguably amongst the most challenging problems and opportunities that we face, which is: How do we make healthcare better for all of us?

Dr. Chandra: What I like about the summit is it is giving people a forum to showcase their ideas of potential applications of AI in health care.

AI is in its early stages in its development. Nobody really has all the answers. Nobody really knows exactly what it is going to look like in the future. So, it's really important to create a safe space where people can share ideas, learn from each other, and collaborate. Because that's how I think the best creative ideas will surface, arise. Part of it is about benefiting from the wisdom of folks that bring their expertise and share their ideas. The other part is how do you create the dynamic of deep collaboration between technology and health care? And that's the long-term objective of a forum like this.

Dr. Chandra: Potential greatest benefits in health care are across the board. Health care in the U.S. is really good, but there is an opportunity to bring AI for making health care cheaper, more scalable, and more accessible.

There's a scarcity of physicians. Our ability to take care of patients is limited by the number of doctors we can hire and the number of nurses we can hire. And health care has a chronic issue of overworked caregivers. So, our goal here over time is how can we bring AI effectively and deliberately and apply it to health-care problems that can help us make health care cheaper, more scalable, more accessible so that patients get better care and they find it easier to access care.

Dr. Chandra: We've been on a journey over the last few years, and perhaps that journey will never be done. There are some areas that have been that we have worked on with good success in applying AI to health care and they range from clinical to nonclinical.

We've done work with using AI for improving clinical care and outcomes. We use AI as a prediction tool for the onset of sepsis, which is a deadly bloodstream infection with a very high mortality rate. And AI is helping us take better care of patients with better clinical outcomes.

The other extreme is using AI for coding. Coding is a process by which we look at the documentation that physicians document for the care that they provide, convert that into billing codes, and send it to insurance. This is very manual, very cumbersome, and full of friction. And again, we are trying to use AI to say, “can we make that process cheaper, simpler, better, faster for all parties?” So, we have AI efforts at both ends of the spectrum.

The third category, which must be said, is the breakout product for AI in health care over the last year, has been an AI scribe, which essentially is a tool that can listen to a physician–patient conversation, transcribe it to text, summarize it, and automatically—I need to emphasize automatically—generate the physician notes and the patient notes at the end of the encounter.

This is so important because today physicians spend roughly 10 minutes for every encounter. They spend anywhere from 1 to 3 hours a day documenting notes from their patient encounters. And with good technology, they can focus more on patient care and less time on writing it all down. So that's been the breakout product of the year. And you know, we are thrilled it has made a huge difference to us.

So those are some of the examples of successes that we've had in applying AI to health care.

Dr. Chandra: I’m going to answer that question in two parts. I would say there's a 2-year time frame, and then there's a multi-year time frame. I think that health care lags behind almost any other industry in terms of using technology for efficiency, for automation, and honestly, for product experience. All of us, as patients, struggle to access health-care systems.

And that's just unfortunately true.

There's an element I'm most excited about in the near-to-medium term for how can we bring technology to make health care a little bit more scalable, a little bit more accessible, and improve the friction and reduce the cost? And I think that that is something where there are plenty of opportunities that I think will bear fruit over the next couple of years.

In the long term, the inspiring vision is how can you build AI that is clinically sound and safe so that it can start to assist physicians more directly in care delivery? And the reason that's essential is that it will enable physicians to operate at top of license. It will relieve them of the mundane work, and it will enable them to take better care of patients and at greater scale. And, in the long term, I'm really excited about the potential for building clinically safe and sound AI.