Wanted: dedicated hospital AI departments

There's been plenty of hype surrounding the promise of AI in healthcare. That's according to a group of doctors and data scientists who recently published a commentary in BMJ Health & Care Informatics calling on hospitals to establish "organized and dedicated" clinical departments whose primary focus is the successful implementation of AI. "Within academic medicine," they argue, "algorithms are currently developed in silos by researchers interested in the intersection of healthcare and machine learning. This has led to a panoply of published models trained on health data, yet only a handful have been prospectively evaluated on patients.'' In their view, the general "lack of clinical results is the byproduct of a lack of coherence, leadership and vision. Hence, unless we change course, we should expect that AI deployment in healthcare will progress much the way the EHR revolution did before it, that is, mainly based on corporate and administrative benefits without requiring any demonstrable improvements in processes or outcomes for our patients or ourselves." Given the range of challenges facing the implementation of AI in healthcare, the group says any department of AI's primary focus should be on making healthcare organizations "AI Ready." Specifically, resulting "initiatives should lead to the development of models that will directly benefit the health of our patients, pioneer research that advances the field of clinical AI, focus on its integration into clinical workflows and foster educational programs and fellowships to ensure we are training current practitioners as well as the next generation of leaders in this field." Moreover, dedicated departments should be front and center when it comes to the implementation, utilization and enhancement of the infrastructures that underlie AI solutions. "Central to this mission will be removing barriers to data access, and the proposed department would therefore assume partnered stewardship of the institution's data as part of its mandate.