Inflect Health CEO Rick Newell MD MPH Shares Expertise at ED Legal Letter
Artificial Intelligence carries real risk and real opportunities for emergency departments
At Inflect Health, we take great pride in staying not just on top of emerging trends in Health Tech, but in keeping our eyes on the future before these trends emerge.
One of the most promising places in which we see areas of opportunity are in the fields of AI and machine learning. They carry significant possibilities for scalability in treatment models and in preserving the patient-provider relationship as scaling continues. This allows providers to spend more quality time treating and serving real humans.
According to a McKinsey report from as recent as March 2020 the private sector continues to play a significant role in the investment of time and resources into development of AI for healthcare. Venture capital funding for the top 50 firms in healthcare-related AI was already reaching $8.5 billion at the time, and big tech firms, startups, pharmaceutical and medical-devices firms and health insurers have all clamored harder to invest since Covid-19 emerged.
That said, there’s plenty of potential landmines in the AI landscape. As providers, payers, and other players in the healthcare ecosystem adopt the technologies, there’s still potential for bias, mistakes, and misinformation.
Inflect Health CEO and Vituity Chief Transformation Officer Rick Newell, MD MPH offered his insights recently over at ED Legal Letter in an article about how artificial intelligence could affect ED provider’s malpractice risk, along with other top minds in the healthcare industry.
His take on the subject?
AI adoption will require “significant time, attention, and funding to better understand the benefits in the ED setting,” says Rick Newell, MD, MPH, BCCI, FACEP, chief transformation officer at Emeryville, CA-based Vituity.
Currently, AI tends to reproduce existing systems with greater efficiency. If care in the ED is problematic to begin with, AI could make it worse. Instead of addressing safety issues, AI blindly applied to the ED (or other healthcare settings) may figure out how to most efficiently recreate the safety issues. “AI in healthcare, currently, leaves much to be desired,” Newell observes.
That does not mean an EP can blame AI for negligent care. Ultimately, ED providers are responsible for the care of the patient. “As such, the malpractice risk will continue to lie with them,” Newell cautions.
AI and machine learning could affect malpractice risk for EDs in a positive way. “The ability to gain insights into disease processes in previously impossible ways is staggering,” Newell says. “We will see better care, better outcomes, and, theoretically, reduced malpractice risk.”
You can read the full article here.
For more information about Inflect Health and how we’re helping seed and pre-seed companies transform healthcare be sure to visit us at InflectHealth.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
