Healthcare’s long road to digitization gets an AI boost

Penn is just one in a class of innovative CIO100 award winning healthcare providers that are pushing boundaries in the digitization of healthcare. Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, the University of Miami Health System, and Atlantic Health have all moved forward with projects in the areas of precision medicine, machine learning, ambient documentation, and more. “From a clinical perspective, we’re seeing advances in radiology, diagnostic services, and pathology,” says Bill Fera, MD and principal who leads the AI practice at Deloitte Consulting.

An AI first at Penn

The AI-based CT scan analysis system is one of the first to be deployed into a clinical practice, in part because research-driven academic medical practices can build and run their own tools without going through the rigorous process that healthcare product manufacturers face to get approval from the FDA. “We can’t give it away or sell it, but we can use it in our practice,” Kahn says.

The system didn’t come together overnight, though. “It was probably two years before the algorithm was truly ready to go into production,” says Donovan Reid, associate director of information services applications at Penn Medicine, and four years went by before the system finally was ready for production last year.