Agentic AI is a scorching matter throughout quite a few industries together with healthcare. Everybody appears to be buzzing about AGI, envisioning Jarvis from Iron Man the place AI programs are able to human-level intelligence and decision-making capabilities.
The joy is comprehensible – immediately there’s a actual alternative to construct fashions and robots that mimic human duties and might work together and interact with people. Companies are captivated with this functionality, particularly in industries with labor shortages to interchange human employees with AI machines who can automate duties extra effectively, with out errors or monetary compensation.
However on the subject of healthcare, I feel we have to take a minute to evaluate at a deeper stage. Usually, healthcare is a extremely regulated business for good purpose and can’t tackle a number of the dangers and failures inherent with AI that different industries can. We have to consider agentic AI by way of the precise lens of the healthcare business and its workflows, evaluating the wants of suppliers, healthcare organizations in addition to sufferers, recognizing that healthcare is just not monolithic and may have workflows which might be extra applicable than others for implementing AI.
To grasp this requires being sincere concerning the strengths and weaknesses of agentic AI. LLMs excel at artistic processes – for instance, ChatGPT can immediately create a brand new music about Taylor Swift’s newest album within the fashion of Dr. Seuss with minimal prompts. Comparatively, rules-based engines are good at structured output. Think about a immediate for a self-driving automobile: “When a visitors gentle is pink, THEN cease.” What’s fascinating about agentic AI is that it’ll seemingly fall someplace within the center – partly rules-based and partly artistic, and navigating that center floor and the suitable threat and reward of when it must be utilized in healthcare workflows is the large problem.
Essentially the most helpful heuristic I’ve discovered on this matter is wanting on the idea of threat versus consequence. I outline threat as the proportion that one thing would fail and consequence as the result of that failure.
In situations the place workflow dangers are excessive, you don’t need the agentic course of to personal it – the fact is that each AI mannequin will fail in some unspecified time in the future and the price of that failure might be too excessive on the subject of healthcare outcomes.
Listed below are two examples the place agentic workflows wouldn’t work:
- Authoring or defining superior directives (end-of-life planning). There’s clearly a artistic and interpretive workflow right here that requires empathy, human expertise, and judgement on when to information vs. when to pay attention; as a result of the supply of knowledge (individuals and their conditions) usually are not all equal. It’s additionally a scenario with excessive penalties that you simply don’t wish to get fallacious in any approach form or type.
- Managing triage in an ER — a chaotic, fast-moving surroundings. Individuals are greatest suited to make fast choices — there’s no time to enter information into an agent.
Nonetheless, listed here are two examples of the place agentic AI would work in healthcare:
- Unlocking EHR information utilizing an agent to automate a sequence of duties that require it to navigate a person interface. Enterprise stage software program has completed this earlier than. It was once known as RPA or Robotic Course of Automation, however now agent-powered processes can do that with far more resilience.
- Reviewing affected person charts to verify emergent power situations weren’t missed by clinicians.
Proper now, I feel agentic AI is at a stage the place it should fail if it begins telling docs what to do and takes over determination making — and worse, damage the belief of everybody (by its affiliation) with synthetic intelligence in drugs. When affected person security, empathy and human judgment take priority over value financial savings and potential effectivity enhancements, a human should be within the loop. However automating duties, word taking, extracting information — the tedious, guide processes in healthcare that don’t require human intervention in each step — is a good place to start implementing AI. The healthcare business must be how AI can discover and current related information with context to allow human clinicians to make knowledgeable choices, releasing up suppliers’ time to cut back burnout and permit them to supply extra personalised affected person care to enhance affected person outcomes.
Photograph: filo, Getty Pictures
Isaac Park spent his youth tinkering with expertise and in highschool, began his formal schooling in software program growth. After transferring to Durham, North Carolina, he graduated from Duke College with a Bachelor of Science diploma in Pc Science. Isaac started his expertise profession instantly, working as a software program developer, constructing front-end frameworks. Afterwards, he moved right into a product administration function, guiding stakeholders and technical groups by way of all kinds of initiatives from inception to ultimate launch.
In 2009, he co-founded an innovation and product studio, Pathos Ethos, and guided startups and company innovation groups by way of business-changing digital merchandise within the healthcare and protection verticals: all the best way from releasing a multi-million greenback software program product, to constructing a local cellular utility utilized by over 1M customers concurrently. On the finish of 2022, he exited Pathos Ethos and joined the Duke Pratt College of Engineering, serving as school for the Christensen Household Middle for Innovation in Product Administration and Innovation. In 2023, he co-founded an AI-Native healthcare expertise firm, Keebler Well beingand at the moment serves because the CEO.
This submit seems by way of the MedCity Influencers program. Anybody can publish their perspective on enterprise and innovation in healthcare on MedCity Information by way of MedCity Influencers. Click on right here to learn how.
