The best products and solutions are often born out of personal experiences. For Sam De Brouwer, CEO and Co-Founder of doc.ai, her breakthrough moment occurred after her son was hospitalized and induced into a coma as a result of a severe accident. Frustrated, anxious, and wanting to help, Sam found herself doing what any mother would; looking for ways she could make a difference.

“What I was seeing at the hospital, and what I was trying to do for my son, I saw other parents trying to do the same thing. Trying to understand the machines, trying to understand those numbers, trying to understand the language, trying to access the information so that you could ask for second opinions, because the situation was too serious to not ask for a second or third opinion.”

With a background at the intersection of technology, research, and healthcare, Sam and her husband launched doc.ai in 2016 in an effort to accelerate digital transformation in the healthcare space. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Sam details some of the issues within the healthcare space when it comes to utilizing data to produce actionable learning models, how neural nets are impacting data collection and the future of edge A.I. in healthcare.

Main Takeaways

• A Better Way: The biggest issue with how data is recorded and distributed within the healthcare industry is that all data is siloed and fragmented, meaning that instead of data being easily available to help with learning models and predictive science, the opposite is true, making digital tasks difficult for third party companies.
• Neural Nets for the Win: By utilizing neural nets, data collection has become as easy as taking a picture. Neural nets are a machine learning technique that gathers data and insights based on previous training data. Doc.ai uses these techniques to record information such as height, weight, and age and then uploads that information to the cloud in an effort to make that data accessible in real-time.
• iDoctor: The future of the healthcare industry hinges on technologies such as A.I. and federated learning. Doctors and healthcare professionals should be embracing automation techniques in order to not get bogged down by rudimentary tasks that take time away from them and their patients.