As president of Bioventures, the technology licensing office and business incubator based at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Dr. Kevin Sexton helps researchers in the health care field turn their ideas into startups.
But at a symposium in Little Rock on Wednesday on the future of health care in Arkansas, Sexton also emphasized the importance of the human element.
“The system is gonna have to work with technology … When I think about AI, I think it’s really good at ID’ing, and I think it’s really good at correlation, but it’s not really good at judgment, and I think that’s where the doctors come in,” Sexton said.
Sexton was a panelist at the event, hosted by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement to celebrate its 25th anniversary, at the Ron Robinson Theater.
The keynote speaker was Shawn DuBravac, an economist and author. He talked about how human behavior has evolved along with technology.
One of the largest challenges in health care is adjusting to and accommodating those changes, DuBravac said.
“How do we start to deliver new services, different services with the technology changing? And at the same time, we have all of these companies coming into the traditional healthcare space, and you don’t have to look far to see the retailization, if you will, of health care,” he said.
The use of artificial intelligence can benefit patients, he said.
For example, he mentioned the use of sensors and cameras in hospital rooms to indicate whether the room had been sanitized.
“So you’re capturing all of that data that was already there, but it wasn’t being organized, structured and redeployed in certain ways,” DuBravac said. “Something simple like this helps us reinforce the protocols that we’ve set.”
“We’re seeing data being used to define our environment, and we’re seeing this play out in lots of different spaces,” DuBravac said.
All of the panelists said artificial intelligence will continue to grow, affecting health care and their daily lives.
“Inputting it into a usable format like for data entry is probably going to eliminate a lot of the less productive work in my field, and I think it’s going to happen the same way in medicine,” Stuart Irby, senior vice president of of health and life sciences at Stephens Inc., said.
Clinicians spend a large portion of their time entering data or administrative work, he said, “and if you can remove that, think about how much more time they could spend with the patient.”
Craig Wilson, health policy director at the Center for Health Improvement, who was the panel’s moderator, said the fear associated with artificial intelligence is centered around privacy, loss of the human element in medicine and the potential to become dependent on it.
Dr. Harold Betton, chief operating officer for the Arkansas Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Association’s board of directors, said he does worry about those issues as a practicing physician.
“We need to make sure that AI does not ever replace human interaction,” Betton said. “What’s happening is that fewer and fewer physicians are touching their patients and observing them. Eventually people could just go to a kiosk to get their prescriptions.”
Ly is a Report for America Corps member.