While a robot doctor at the bedside is not on the horizon, data-driven digital health is transforming how we receive care - and society is still playing catch-up on the ramifications. In 2012, Professor Enrico Coiera, Founding Director of the Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) at the Australian Institute for Health Innovation, published a paper titled The Dangerous Decade. In it, he warned that more information and communication technology (ICT) would be deployed into healthcare in the 10 years to 2022 than in the health system's entire history to date. "Systems will be larger in scope, more complex, and move from regional to national and supranational scale," he wrote. "Yet we are at roughly the same place the aviation industry was in the 1950s with respect to system safety."

It's 10 a.m. on a Monday, and Aman, one of the developers of a new artificial intelligence tool, is excited about the technology launching that day. Leaders of Duke University Hospital's intensive care unit had asked Aman and his colleagues to develop an AI tool to help prevent overcrowding in their unit. Research had shown that patients coming to the hospital with a particular type of heart attack did not require hospitalization in the ICU, and its leaders hoped that an AI tool would help emergency room clinicians identify these patients and refer them to noncritical care. This would both improve quality of care for patients and reduce unnecessary costs. Aman and his team of cardiologists, data scientists, computer scientists, and project managers had developed an AI tool that made it easy for clinicians to identify these patients.

Artificial intelligence tools are complicated computer programs that suck in vast amounts of data, search for patterns or trajectories, and make a prediction or recommendation to help guide a decision. Patients don't need to understand these algorithms at a data-scientist level, but it's still useful for people to have a general idea of how AI-based healthcare tools work, says Suresh Balu, program director at the Duke Institute for Health Innovation. Some patients can get a little jumpy when they hear algorithms are being used in their care, says Mark Sendak, a data scientist at the Duke Institute for Health Innovation. We picked an algorithm that flags patients in the early stages of sepsis -- a life-threatening complication from an infection that results in widespread inflammation through the body. The algorithm we're looking at underpins a program called Sepsis Watch, which Sendak and Balu helped develop at Duke University.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are everywhere in healthcare. They sort through patients' data to predict who will develop medical conditions like heart disease or diabetes, they help doctors figure out which people in an emergency room are the sickest, and they screen medical images to find evidence of diseases. But even as AI algorithms become more important to medicine, they're often invisible to people receiving care. Artificial intelligence tools are complicated computer programs that suck in vast amounts of data, search for patterns or trajectories, and make a prediction or recommendation to help guide a decision. Sometimes, the way algorithms process all of the information they're taking in is a black box -- inscrutable even to the people who designed the program.

After decades of rapid progress, advances in medical technologies have slowed in recent years. But there are reasons to be hopeful, according to the Global Innovation Index 2019, with artificial intelligence, genomics, and mobile health applications all poised to transform global healthcare. GENEVA, 31 October 2019 - In the context of the joint technical symposium by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), GII Co-Editor Sacha Wunsch-Vincent presented the results of the GII 2019 Theme Chapter on Creating Healthy Lives -- The Future of Medical Innovation, answering the question: "Are we about to enter a new "golden age" of medical innovation?" Over the last century, improvements in healthcare have doubled life expectancy in developed and developing countries, resulting in an expanded workforce, greater economic growth and improved quality of life. Driving those improvements has been healthcare innovation, both in technologies, such as chemotherapy and joint replacements, and in processes, such as better hygiene and enhanced public health planning.