Employing artificial intelligence to help improve outcomes for people with cardiovascular disease is the focus of a three-year, $15 million collaboration among Cornell Tech, the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science (Cornell Bowers CIS) and NewYork-Presbyterian – with physicians from its affiliated medical schools Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (Columbia University VP&S). The Cardiovascular AI Initiative, to be funded by NewYork-Presbyterian, was launched this summer in a virtual meeting featuring approximately 40 representatives from the institutions. "AI is poised to fundamentally transform outcomes in cardiovascular health care by providing doctors with better models for diagnosis and risk prediction in heart disease," said Kavita Bala, professor of computer science and dean of Cornell Bowers CIS. "This unique collaboration between Cornell's world-leading experts in machine learning and AI and outstanding cardiologists and clinicians from NewYork-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia will drive this next wave of innovation for long-lasting impact on cardiovascular health care." "NewYork-Presbyterian is thrilled to be joining forces with Cornell Tech and Cornell Bowers CIS to harness advanced technology and develop insights into the prediction and prevention of heart disease to benefit our patients," said Dr. Steven J. Corwin, president and chief executive officer of NewYork-Presbyterian. "Together with our world-class physicians from Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia, we can transform the way health care is delivered."

Reductions in patient length of stay have been shown to reduce costs and improve outcomes. There are a number of ways for hospitals and health systems to reduce length of stay, the majority of which are time-intensive and center on restructuring existing operations. To help bolster and streamline efforts to reduce length of stay, systems such as New York City-based NewYork-Presbyterian have turned to artificial intelligence technology from Qventus to automate care coordination, which not only improves efficiency but also eases the administrative burden on hospital staff. During an Aug. 6 webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Qventus, Courtney Vose, DNP, MBA, RN, APRN, NEA-BC, vice president and chief nursing officer of NewYork-Presbyterian, and Ryan Starks, MBA, senior product marketing manager at Qventus, discussed how NewYork-Presbyterian deployed the Qventus platform and the three most important lessons the health system learned in the process. Systems like Qventus' may be high-tech, but traditional leadership roles are still necessary in order to glean the most benefit from these platforms and drive actual change, according to Mr. Starks.

The presence of artificial intelligence-powered IT is growing in healthcare. More and more CIOs and caregivers are finding new uses for powerful AI to help its human users in the delivery of care, both behind the scenes and at the point of care. Dashboards are popular tools for healthcare executives and caregivers to use to track and measure technologies in action. And AI is no different in this respect, though it is very different from other technologies in its complexity. So some forward-looking CIOs are putting together AI dashboards, or beginning to think about such dashboards and what would make them useful tools.