Healthcare AI Needs a Breadth and Depth of Data

Today I’m enjoying the New England HIMSS Spring Conference including an amazing keynote session by Dale Sanders from Health Catalyst. Next week I’ll be following up this blog post with some other insights that Dale shared at the New England HIMSS event, but today I just wanted to highlight one powerful concept that he shared:

Healthcare AI Needs a Breadth and Depth of Data

As part of this idea, Dale shared the following image to illustrate how much data is really needed for AI to effectively assess our health:

Dale pointed out that in healthcare today we really only have access to the data in the bottom right corner. That’s not enough data for AI to be able to properly assess someone’s health. Dale also suggested the following about EHR data:

Long story short, the EHR data is not going to be enough to truly assess someone’s health. As Google recently proved, a simple algorithm with more data is much more powerful than a sophisticated algorithm with less data. While we think we have a lot of data in healthcare, we really don’t have that much data. Dale Sanders made a great case for why we need more data if we want AI to be effective in healthcare.

What are you doing in your organization to collect data? What are you doing to get access to this data? Does collection of all of this data scare anyone? How far away are we from this data driven, AI future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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