There’s a lot of talk out there about how artificial intelligence will change the way doctors and nurses take care of patients; you hear some of it right here on this show. But all of that still feels like a forecast rather than a present reality. When you look really closely, it’s hard to find concrete examples where AI is already helping healthcare providers make better decisions that improve patient outcomes and take costs out of the system.

That’s why Harry wanted to have Nassib Chamoun on the show. Chamoun is the founder and CEO of Health Data Analytics Institute (HDAI), which has been working with a major healthcare system, Houston Methodist, to test out a working platform called HealthVision. It's a collection of AI-driven models that use huge amounts of data, both from Medicare and from Houston’s own electronic health record system, to make predictions that help doctors and administrators spend less time poring over records and data, and more time interacting with actual patients and making good clinical and management decisions.

Nassib has a way of talking about HDAI and HealthVision that leaves out the hype and focuses on the real-world problems AI can solve for doctors and administrators—like how to identify the patients discharged from hospitals to their homes or to skilled nursing facilities who are at the highest risk of complications, and which interventions could help keep them alive and prevent readmission. Nassib tells Harry that “AI is not magic" and points out that even the most famous large language models, like ChatGPT, are just massive statistical representations of data created, collected, or curated by humans. And while these models are powerful, Nassib argues they’ll need guardrails around them to guarantee transparency and explainability and to prevent bias, before they can be useful in high-stakes fields like healthcare.

HDAI has raised tens of millions of dollars of capital and spent seven years developing HealthVision, and now the company is getting ready to grow beyond Houston Methodist and deploy the system at other big healthcare institutions like the Cleveland Clinic and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute—so more providers will get a chance to test whether AI can keep patients healthier and make healthcare delivery more efficient.

For a full transcript of this episode, please visit our episode page at http://www.glorikian.com/podcast 

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