The excitement over generative AI--and AI in general--has reached the multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry, driven by the news of ChatGPT passing the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) and the rapid introduction of new healthcare-related AI applications. Bill Gates, for example, is recommending the use of generative AI tools for primary diagnoses of patients. While acknowledging that AI will inevitably misdiagnose patients, Gates argues that the upside is worth it. Preventing misdiagnoses that can impact, at the very least, a patient's quality of life, depends a lot on the quality and availability of the health data that is fed into the AI model. The current excitement notwithstanding, the development of AI healthcare solutions has been severely constrained by the dearth of comprehensive and representative real-world health data.

Longtime Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Chief Information Officer Dr. John Halamka left that role six months ago after more than two decades – during which time he also became one of the most vocal health information technology champions and visible thought leaders during a pivotal time of IT uptake. Halamka has been traveling the world recently – more than 400,000 miles this year, he says – from Europe to Israel to Africa to China, back to his Sherborn, Massachusetts-based Unity Farm Sanctuary for a quick visit with Dudley, his shaggy Scottish Highland Bull, and then out again to explore the newest global trends in leading-edge digital health. Halamka will keynote the ConVerge2Xcelerate event in Boston on October 15, hosted by Blockchain in Healthcare Today – where he is editor-in-chief – and co-presented as part of the preconference activities of the Connected Health Conference. We caught up with him recently at another Boston event and asked him about what he's seeing on his travels. You were CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess for so long – twenty two years. How has your newish gig, as International Healthcare Innovation Professor, been going? A. That's my academic title, my Harvard Medical School title, and that was three years ago. But the official transition from CIO, a hospital based-title, was March 1, 2019. That's when the merger of Beth Israel and Lahey came together, and the CEO and I talked about: How do you create innovation? So what is next with healthcare innovation?

Burdened by an overabundance of KPIs, the health care sector can look to machine learning to force a focus on the metrics that matter most. Health care is an industry where innovation predominates and demands for greater accountability have intensified. In this enormous, complex, and highly regulated sector, there is much to measure to improve patient outcomes, lower costs, and maintain trust. Importantly, concerns over patient privacy increasingly dominate discussions about using first-party data. Organizations increasingly confront the challenge of keeping their key performance indicators (KPIs) from becoming unwieldy and unmanageable.