AI-First Healthcare

Chapter 7. AI at Scale for Healthcare Organizations

Healthcare has an internal compass aligning its goals that is called the quadruple aim. The quadruple aim comprises improving the health of populations, improving the healthcare experience, reducing per capita costs of healthcare, and improving the work-life balance of healthcare professionals. The quadruple aim remains elusive. Even with the many successes of AI in healthcare, AI has not yet scaled in a way that materially impacts the quadruple aim. The success of algorithms in real-world clinical settings continues to be modest. Machine learning models are likely to do worse in the real world than in research settings. Yet the excitement of AI’s potential remains. There are no silver bullets that deliver on the promises of the quadruple aim. Our discussion in this chapter of AI at scale for healthcare organizations focuses on what business and technology stakeholders can do in partnership to both mainstream AI in their organizations and scale AI to achieve a material impact on the quadruple aim.

Achieving AI at Scale

AI promises to be one of the most impactful technologies of the decade and for years to come, as it improves by leaps and bounds each year. For example, in 2012, machines became as good as or better than humans in several object recognition tasks. This spawned research and efforts to see whether machines could outperform clinicians. Several documented cases show deep neural networks achieving a diagnostic performance ...