From WisPolitics.com/WisBusiness.com …
— An executive with the Medical College of Wisconsin says the healthcare field is poised to deliver on the true promise of precision medicine thanks to AI.
David Hotchkiss, vice president and chief information and security officer for MCW, yesterday addressed attendees of BioForward Wisconsin’s Biohealth Summit in Milwaukee.
“Precision medicine … that’s long been the desire in healthcare, but it’s been a tagline because we’ve never achieved it,” Hotchkiss said. “And I think now we’re on the cusp of doing it, because … the only thing that holds us back is the compute available to the problem we’re chasing.”
He highlighted the technology’s potential to assess the wide array of data within a given patient’s electronic health record and point to the most likely diagnosis, as well as other potential causes that may be playing a role.
Still, he and other panelists yesterday stressed the importance of building trust in these systems, as well as proper data governance and regulation to ensure the results of AI decisions can be trusted.
Peter Szotkowski, global head of portfolio for computational sciences for Roche subsidiary Genentech, said AI is helping the biotech firm optimize molecules for drug development. He said the technology can “expand the possibilities” for what’s typically a linear process.
“The trustworthiness comes in when you put that human in the loop, or you keep the human embedded in the loop as you expand the opportunities for what they can interrogate,” he said yesterday.
That view was echoed by Phil Nwafor, director of healthcare and life sciences strategic industries for Google Cloud, who also stressed the importance of external regulation in this space. While he emphasized the company’s internal guardrails, aimed at preventing bias or weaponization for a given AI application, he also said “we’ve been very vocal” about the need for regulation.
“Regulation, for us, we believe is the way,” he said. “Yes, it might cause a slowdown but the cost is heavy if we don’t do things the right way.”
At the same time, members of the medical community are clamoring for AI tools in a way they haven’t previously for other technologies, according to Hotchkiss.
“This is the first time in my career that clinicians have asked for this tech, that those that are providing care want technology,” he said. “Everything else we have dictated to them … it’s all been billing, it’s all been regulatory, it’s all been something that’s been mandated to them.”
Panelists yesterday also discussed the role of AI in advancing pilot projects, with Szotkowski noting the technology is “introducing a new paradigm” for impactful pilot efforts.
“When we apply some of the AI solutions, the barrier of entry to use that … is so much lower than it was before,” he said, adding “we get a lot of value out of utilization of AI even at the pilot stage in a lot of use cases.”
Still, panelists cautioned against the tendency of “chasing shiny objects” in the world of AI deployment, pointing to the importance of proper foundational readiness, seamlessly integrating it into operations and appropriate data “ownership” within the organization.
Nwafor called for ensuring “the data is not just accurate, it’s traceable, explainable, it’s secure” and verifiable within the AI system.
“Being able to take care of that house and then eventually building AI competency on it, it usually leads to that scale of success,” he said.
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— Marquette University alumnus Nanda Alapati has donated $2 million to the university for biological sciences research, funding scientific and lab equipment, student experiences and research assistants.
The university yesterday announced the donation, made to honor Alapat’s father Dr. A. Krishna Kumaran, who was a professor in the university’s Biological Sciences Department from 1969 to 1997. Alapati, who graduated in 1982, said Kumaran “really enjoyed challenging his students” and making them think.
“My father believed that, in addition to teaching, a professor’s role was to push the boundaries of knowledge through research and inspire students to engage in research themselves,” he said in a statement.
See the release below.
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