🙂 AI Fights Blindness

TOGETHER WITH

Good morning! 

Welcome to Healthcare AI News, your weekly dose of the latest developments and headlines in the world of Healthcare AI.

In this issue, we explore:

✅ Headlines: AI app uses selfies for health diagnostics

✅ Industry: Who is responsible if healthcare AI fails?

✅ Feature: The Chief AI Officer

✅ Interesting Reads: Jeff Bezos and fellow billionaires race for immortality

✅ Tech:  Healthcare data is a researcher’s gold mine

✅ Venture Pipeline: 5 celebrity digital health investors

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HEADLINE ROUNDUP

• People are going blind. AI can help fight it (Read More)

• Promises and pitfalls of ChatGPT in medicine (Read More)

• Fighting the Opioid crisis: 5 AI solutions for safer prescription practices (Read More)

• AI app uses selfies for health diagnostics (Read More)

• AI may someday work medical miracles (Read More)

• The transformative impact of AI in Medical Tech (Read More)

• When AI bots pose as humans (Read More)

• Top three reasons why AI is critical for Value-Based care (Read More)

TOGETHER WITH GRETEL

AI in healthcare could make millions of lives better — but it’s often held back by data privacy and model improvement challenges.

Join this fireside chat with leading researchers and scientists to learn how healthcare and pharma are tackling these challenges

Gretel's Senior Applied Scientist, Lipika Ramaswamy will lead a discussion on using synthetic data — and techniques like differential privacy — to safely anonymize sensitive data like EHR.

Anmol Arora of Cambridge University and Finn Janson, from Roche, also join the discussion. Submit questions in advance to be answered during the session!

👉 Wednesday, July 19th.

INDUSTRY NEWS

• How algorithmic bias impacts marginalized groups (Read More)

• SnapCalorie taps AI to estimate the caloric content of food from photos (Read More)

• Who is responsible if Healthcare AI fails? (Read More)

• Generative AI is helping to shake up health research. Could it lead to a smoke-free future? (Read More)

• How one California health system is learning from Silicon Valley, using AI (Read More)

• How often do Health insurers say no to patients? No one knows (Read More)

• This drug can give us an edge in the bacteria-antibiotics arms race (Read More)

• Healthcare and data. How to measure quality (Read More)

THE FEATURE

The Chief AI Officer

Does your healthcare company need a Chief AI Officer?

Hospital CEOs. Clinicians-turned-founders. Insurance execs. These are the leaders many of us think of when it comes to corporate healthcare.

But increasingly, in organizations across the industry, there’s a new kid on the block: the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO).

This new leadership role is not to be confused with the CTO. Rather than managing your organization’s overall technology infrastructure stack, CAIOs are leaders who bring doctorate-level AI-specific expertise to your organization’s leadership team.

In today’s feature, we’re reviewing 3 ways to tell your organization needs this kind of expert in the C-Suite. And if you find that you do—we’re also breaking down how to get started hiring a healthcare CAIO.

3 signs your healthcare org needs a Chief AI Officer

The idea of hiring a CAIO might be worth bringing up at your next board meeting if…

1. Your company already offers AI solutions

Perhaps this seems like the obvious one.

But bringing in a leader to manage an existing wing of your business can also be a source of friction. After all, you don’t want to silo away the AI arm of your offerings from the rest of your technology.

Think of hiring a CAIO as a way to show you take your company’s leadership in this growing space seriously. And even if you’ve been crushing the healthcare AI space for some time, it’s not too late to bring in a CAIO.

2. Your company is exploring seed opportunities in AI

Or even eyeing a full pivot toward AI.

Before taking that leap, bringing a CAIO in to advise your leadership team will help ensure that your ideas for implementing AI make sense.

Having a CAIO join your organization—or AI-focused team—on the ground level is also a prudent sign to external stakeholders. In other words: potential investors, partners, and even consumers will see from this move that you take your responsibility in working with AI seriously. As you should.

3. You’re not a health tech company, but you’re interested in using AI to improve your business operations

Non-tech healthcare organizations—from insurers to health systems—are using AI for marketing, insurance authorization, dark data analysis, and more.

And many of them could use the AI-specific guidance a CAIO offers.

Even clothing brand Levi’s named a CAIO in 2019. Companies like eBay and GE Healthcare have appointed CAIOs too.

So, why not your healthcare company?

So You Want to Hire a CAIO: How to pick the right person for your health company

Hiring for an entirely new kind of position is tricky. Your CAIO can’t just be any machine learning expert with healthcare experience. Or, rather, we think they shouldn’t be.

Those technical qualifications are a starting point, but to find the right healthcare AI expert for the C-suite, you need to dig a little deeper.

Look for an interest in ethical leadership

In this technological Wild West, organizations like yours are setting ethical standards with respect to healthcare AI.

Robert Donnell, M.D., AI executive for the University of Florida, commented: "This is a leader bringing their community through a very complex change process. Early on, the Chief AI Officer has to be the chief trust officer, the chief learning officer, and the chief knowledge officer on what AI can do and how to get it there."

We won’t try to figure out what the acronyms for all those alternate titles would be. But know this: You need a CAIO who will rise to that responsibility.

Prioritize candidates with horizontal leadership experience

Regardless of the particular way your company plans to use AI, your CAIO needs to be comfortable working across diverse teams.

After all, they won’t just be weighing in on the technical implementation. They’ll need to stay abreast of how your sales and marketing teams are communicating the technology. They’ll interface with legal and compliance—and clinicians.

Hire someone who thrives in ambiguity

To put it bluntly: There aren’t many examples of how this role is supposed to work (yet).

Your CAIO needs to be creative and excited to define your organization’s take on this role. Even if that means eventually writing a lengthy SOP.

Final Thoughts from Healthcare AI Team

Some think that, once AI implementation becomes more commonplace, the CAIO role may begin to disappear. There won’t be as much of a need for a specific expert when knowledge in this area becomes a baseline.

But don’t let that potential long-view discourage you from investing in expert leadership ahead of the curve.

Soon enough, large companies will likely be hiring CAIOs as well—similar to the rise of the Chief Mobile Officer in the early 2010s or that of the CISO at the turn of the century. Right now, this kind of C-suite leadership can still give your organization a competitive edge.

Reply back and tell us what you think: Is the CAIO position necessary for healthcare organizations?

INTERESTING READS

• Jeff Bezos and fellow billionaires race for Immortality (Read More)

• Silicon Valley elites reportedly taking ketamine and attending psychedelic parties to bolster their focus and creativity (Read More)

• Why more CIOs are becoming CEOs (Read More)

TECH NEWS

• Snowflake and NVIDIA team up to help businesses harness data for Generative AI in the cloud (Read More)

• Healthcare data is a researcher’s gold mine (Read More)

• Biggest Healthcare data breaches reported so far this year (Read More)

• A new approach trains Large Language Models in half the time (Read More)

• 10 things every CISO needs to know about identity and access management (IAM) (Read More)

VENTURE PIPELINE

• Databricks signs definitive agreement to acquire MosaicML, a leading Generative AI platform (Read More)

• Augmedics snaps up $82.5M to advance spinal surgery using AR and AI (Read More)

• 5 celebrity digital health investors (Read More)

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