How Artificial Intelligence Can Benefit Healthcare Institutions: A Recap of the 2019 HIMSS Summer Solstice
Last week, HiveIO had the pleasure of joining the North Carolina Chapter of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) during their annual Summer Solstice. The Summer Solstice is an educational conference designed for healthcare professionals. During this time, attendees discuss the latest technology advancements in the industry, and exchange experiences to increase their personal performance through continued education.
The 2019 North Carolina HIMSS event focused on artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. Attendees discussed how the technology is already viewed across the industry— from clinical use to payments to information technology (IT)— and how it will revitalize the industry. If you were unable to attend the event, here are some of the key takeaways from the informative sessions:
AI for Clinical Use
Whitley Yi, PharmD from the University of North Carolina Healthcare, explored how AI can improve clinical outcomes in her session. The discussion focused on how humans and AI work together, and which methodologies work best. She concluded that AI can lead to more personalized data for healthcare providers, resulting in better and easier access to good healthcare in rural areas. However, it’s unclear which machine learning algorithms are practical options to enhance patient care. There are several barriers the industry must overcome such as accessibility of training and availability of AI experts.
Understanding Algorithmic Bias
Greg Nelson, Vice President of Analytics and Strategy at Vidant Health and adjunct faculty member at Duke University, explored the framework for AI governance and ways healthcare professionals can address algorithmic bias in machine learning. He concluded that this is an ethical challenge many professionals are struggling to overcome, yet there are ways to overcome the bias to improve ethical concerns. Some of these include developing the right learning model for the problem, selecting a diverse representative training data set, and continuously monitoring the performance of the model using real data.
Bettering Patient Care with AI
Sunil Mishra, Senior Software Engineer at IBM Watson, explored how using AI can better patient care before and after major events. For example, sharing a pamphlet with a patient about an upcoming surgery is out of date. With the help of AI, healthcare professionals can use historical patient information, combined with data gathered from similar surgeries, to better prepare patients before and after surgery. To make this happen, healthcare institutions will need to invest in a solid foundational technology such as restful API, data persistence, or net-scale.
Building AI into a Foundation
AI is a powerful tool when understood and used correctly. At HiveIO, we are dedicated to providing AI-driven software solutions that set the foundation for future success of healthcare institutions, starting in the data center. The company’s Hive Fabric solution is an AI-ready fabric software that enables healthcare organizations to deploy virtualization technology without the need for vendor complexity or specialists. The latest software release provides Hive Fabric users with increased operational capabilities to further reduce the time needed to support a virtualization environment. It also allows users to maximize the performance, capacity, and spend on existing infrastructure.
It was a pleasure collaborating with members of the North Carolina chapter of HIMSS. We’re looking forward to seeing attendees drive future innovations through the use of AI. To learn more about how HiveIO and Hive Fabric can help your organization become AI-ready without the need for specialists, click here.