This month, the Yale New Haven Health System announced the Health AI Championship, a competition that offers funding for proposals using AI to address healthcare challenges.
The competition, open to all employees in Connecticut healthcare systems, will feature a symposium with national speakers addressing AI’s role in healthcare and live presentations of the top 12 proposals to an independent panel of judges.
According to a press release from YNHHS, the competition is broken down into three phases: selection by participating institutions, judging of the selected proposals and the symposium, scheduled for May 27. The grand winner, in addition to winning $100,000, will have the opportunity to validate their algorithm in the Yale New Haven Health data ecosystem.
“We are thrilled to launch the Health AI Championship at a time when AI’s potential to revolutionize healthcare has never been greater,” said Dr. Lee Schwamm, chief digital health officer of YNHHS. “By inviting innovators to share cutting-edge ideas, we are not only fostering collaboration but also paving the way for real-world applications that can significantly improve patient outcomes and streamline healthcare operations.”
Six hospitals have already committed to participating in Yale New Haven Health’s AI Championship, including Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Gaylord Hospital, Nuvance Health, Hartford HealthCare and UConn Health. Schwamm predicts the health AI championship will attract 20-30 teams from healthcare systems across Connecticut.
According to Schwamm, the goal of the Health AI Championship is to drive innovation from the needs of the broader Connecticut healthcare system beyond just YNHHS. He hopes to create an environment where health systems form partnerships to identify areas in which AI could be used most effectively.
AI is already used across health systems, Schwamm explained.
For example, YNHHS uses an AI program to record and summarize conversations between patients and doctors. AI also produces a patient-friendly version of the medical consultation note. Doctors draft responses to patients with the help of AI, which streamlines communication between doctors and patients.
“Then we have a lot of stuff going on in imaging, where the AI is pre-reading the images and suggesting areas to that normality, or ordering the scans to get the most abnormal scans read first,” said Schwamm. “I would say it’s all over the whole system.”
Walter Lindop, who leads the Center for Healthcare Innovation at Yale New Haven Health, believes that AI has historically been used to expedite the administrative side of healthcare by automating routine tasks like prior authorizations.
Through innovation in AI, Lindop hopes that healthcare systems will explore new applications centered around the patient experience. By automating routine tasks for clinicians, such as writing clinical notes, AI can relieve the burden of clinicians and allow more time for interactions with patients, improving the patient experience.
“It’s also improving the quality of the interaction with the patient and translating to that patient experience,” Lindop said. “So to me, the real advantage and shift forward is towards this idea of clinical decision support and clinical care and ultimately impacting the patient experience in a positive way.”
At the YNHH Center for Healthcare and innovation, 25 ongoing projects involve the use of AI, according to Lindop. For example, YNHH has collaborated with companies to use AI in insulin dosing and to optimize supply chains.
Schwamm believes that AI’s most important application — and where it outperforms humans — is synthesizing large amounts of data.
He said that sources like Apple Health kits, health tracking software on smartphones and other applications track patient health and behavior. With AI models, doctors can identify which patients will do well with their treatment, which patients are less likely to follow up on recommendations and which patients might not come for a return visit. Health systems can utilize these tools to direct resources to patients at the greatest risk.
The competition will take place on May 27.
Source: https://yaledailynews.com/
