Cognitive Automation in Clinical Care

Date : 7th Dec 2022 (Wednesday)
Time : 11 – 12pm  (Malaysia time)
Venue : Seri Pacific Hotel, Kuala Lumpur & online

The healthcare industry today is under siege to address growing macroeconomic and socioeconomic challenges including high costs and low quality, increasing regulations, patient expectations, health inequities, and provider consolidation. For example, healthcare waste alone constitutes 25-
30% or about US $1 trillion of the annual healthcare spending in the United States. To increase efficiency and accessibility, artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been used in automating business, administrative, and scheduling processes in eliminating mundane, repetitive tasks performed by humans; however, its application in direct patient care and disease management is lacking. Can we use AI to address the tasks that involve interpreting large amounts of multimodal clinical data and require clinicians’ cognitive capabilities to perform non-routine tasks and enhance human decisionmaking performance or even beat the clinicians’ performance? We believe so. This presentation describes two use cases of Houston Methodist health system on developing and applying cognitive automation in reducing unnecessary cancer biopsies and enhancing detection, diagnosis,
and monitoring of Stroke, thus saving costs while reducing overdiagnosis/overtreatment and misdiagnosis. We will discuss pragmatic issues and research opportunities in designing and implementing AI automation for clinical care. We also hope to engage meaningful a conversation on the possibility of cognitive automation in medicine. If cognitive automation is successful in medicine, it begs the question that what would be the future role of physicians and the patient-physician relationship and patient experience?