Ahead of his talk 'How can AI, focusing on productivity, capacity and patient outcomes, create a revolution towards precision health?' at Intelligent Health UK 2022 (6-7 April, ExCeL London), we asked Dr. Mathias Goyen, Chief Medical Officer EMEA at GE Healthcare, his thoughts on the future of AI in healthcare.
Mathias is currently the Chief Medical Officer EMEA for GE Healthcare, a $17 billion division of General Electric. Mathias is responsible for leading GE Healthcare’s medical, clinical and evidence generation strategies for product modalities in Europe, the Middle East & Africa. Together with his team he provides leadership in healthcare economics and outcomes research and comparative effectiveness research to develop customer value propositions for new and existing products.
How do you think AI will make its biggest mark in healthcare in the next 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?
I hope that AI will increasingly be recognized as a force for good, for promoting fair and equitable healthcare, and for making our lives easier and healthier.
Ultimately, AI has the potential to solve today’s healthcare challenges: access, quality and cost. AI will lead to faster, more accurate diagnosis, translating to individualized patient care and better clinical outcomes. This will be achieved by joining up data throughout the patient journey, across a hospital or hospital networks, to create insights for more targeted care and in the long-run, more predictive medicine vs curative.
If you could solve any global health problem in the world with AI, what would it be?
Healthcare delivery in areas of conflict and crisis.
Presuming that was solved, what would your second choice be?
Infectious disease prevention.
What excites you most about the application of AI in healthcare?
What excited me the most about AI in healthcare is its potential to truly augment the daily work of technologists, radiologists, and other clinicians in the hospital. However, from a clinician’s or radiologist’s perspective AI is only accepted if it doesn’t get more complicated. The irony is that while technology is designed to help productivity, it can add more work and complexity. The best AI application is the one that is invisible, that is seamlessly integrated into the clinical workflow, doing the magic in the background thereby truly empowering physicians to focus on patient care.
What’s your biggest fear in relation to the application of AI in the health/medicine field?
1) Lack of human oversight - AI tools are there to augment for example, the technologist or radiologist, not to replace them. Human oversight is still needed to avoid machine errors and mismanagement.
2) Cyber-attacks - We must always be vigilant when it comes to cyber security. There are manipulations that can change the behaviour of AI systems using tiny pieces of digital data. By changing a few pixels on a lung scan, for instance, someone could fool an AI system into seeing an illness that is not there, or not seeing one that is.
How do you think AI will cause human contact in healthcare to change in the future?
Ask yourself: What do patients want? Patients are always looking for the human touch in medicine. Patients don’t want to get their diagnosis from a computer, they want to talk to a radiologist or doctor. The relationship between doctor and patient will never disappear.
AI can help radiologists with some of the legwork, offering a tremendous opportunity to get radiologists from behind the monitor and bring them back into day light by empowering them to become more “doctor” than ever before.
What does AI mean for the skill requirements of health professionals? How will it change?
We must rethink education and skills and develop an AI-ready workforce. AI in healthcare will require leaders well-versed in both biomedical and data science. There have been recent moves to train students in the science where medicine, biology, and informatics meet through joint degrees, though this is less prevalent in Europe.
More broadly, skills such as basic digital literacy, the fundamentals of genomics, AI, and machine learning need to become mainstream for all practitioners, supplemented by critical-thinking skills and the development of a continuous-learning mind-set.
Alongside upgrading clinical training, healthcare systems need to think about the existing workforce and provide ongoing learning, while practitioners need the time and incentive to continue learning.
Which 2 people do you admire most in the world of AI in healthcare in terms of their work?
Eric Topol - Dr. Eric Topol is a practicing cardiologist and the Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, and Executive Vice-President of Scripps Research in San Diego. Twitter: @EricTopol.
Rasu Shresta - Rasu B. Shrestha, MD, MBA, a radiologist by training, is executive vice president & chief strategy and transformation officer for Atrium Health, one of the most comprehensive and highly integrated not-for-profit healthcare systems in the nation. Twitter: @RasuShrestha.
Why did you choose to present at Intelligent Health?
Intelligent health UK has evolved into one of the most important conferences in the field of healthcare AI. It is a great opportunity for me to discuss with researchers, developers and clinicians about the use of AI in healthcare…
What are your personal goals from the summit?
To get an overview of latest applications of AI in healthcare… and quite frankly, to finally be on a stage again 😊
We look forward to welcoming him on stage! Join Mathias and the AI and healthcare community at Intelligent Health UK to break down the barriers between tech and healthcare and help #saveliveswithai.
The Intelligent Health team
About Intelligent Health UK
Now in its third year, Intelligent Health UK, in partnership with The NHS AI Lab, NIHR, The Health Innovation Network, AHSN Network, and DigitalHealth.London, will bring together our collective communities to the ExCeL London on the 6th and 7th April 2022.
The AI and healthcare community - clinicians, hospital heads, data scientists, startups, academics, and investors, will come together for two days of collaboration and co-creation, to address how AI can be used to alleviate the elective backlog, improve population health, increase operational efficiencies and drive forward moonshot projects as the NHS recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Intelligent Health team
AI and health events calendar for 2022
Intelligent Health UK | 06-07 April 2022 | London, UK
Intelligent Health | 07-08 September 2022 | Basel, Switzerland
