How Artificial Intelligence Could Humanize Health Care

Using artificial intelligence in health care could actually make medicine more human by giving doctors more time to interact with their patients. The technology promises to improve health care by making it more effective and speedy by eliminating some of the mundane functions that eat up doctors' time, said Eric Topol, founder and director of the nonprofit Scripps Research Translational Institute, at Fortune's Brainstorm Health conference on Tuesday in San Diego. Machine learning could free doctors from having to type medical information into patient files while also helping give patients better access to their personal data. "All that effort can then get us to what we've been missing for decades now, which is the true care in health care," Topol said. Topol's vision is the topic of his new book, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. To achieve this optimistic future, he said the health care industry must aggressively adopt artificial intelligence.