Aidoc CEO Elad Walach on AI, imaging and improving care | Data Book podcast

Elad Walach sees the potential for AI to greatly improve the speed and accuracy of diagnostic imaging.

Walach is the CEO and co-founder of Aidoc, a healthcare company that provides an AI platform to help health systems with imaging. The company is already working with some large health systems, including Sutter Health, Mercy and others.

Recently, 12 hospital systems have partnered with Aidoc to form the Diagnostic AI Consortium. Walach talked about the goals for the consortium in the latest episode of Data Book, a podcast from Chief Healthcare Executive®.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Walach also shared his thoughts on AI’s potential to help hospitals improve capacity, ensuring safety with AI, and how hospitals and health systems should be approaching AI. Here are some excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Aidoc is working with 12 hospital systems to form the Diagnostic AI Consortium. Could you just talk about what the consortium's looking to do?

A: “Everybody listening to this podcast, we all share the passion to improve healthcare, right? Improving diagnostic care, improving the capacity, and we're all seeing this massive inflection point coming in the form of foundation models coming finally into clinical care.

“I think we see there are a lot of open questions, questions about guardrails and safety, how do you monitor outcomes, and I think we recognize that this is such a monumental part of healthcare that we can't do this alone, right? And I think every healthcare system realizes they can't do this alone, which is why we all banded together and said, look, we're going to create this living lab where we're going to test these out, and we're going to see what works and what doesn't, and what are the playbooks and what are the guardrails, and we're going to publish about anything and everything, from outcomes to the right way to do it, about workflow, to how to think about training.

Q: You've got some pretty big health systems working together in this consortium: Advocate Health, Cedars-Sinai, Mercy, Sutter Health, Northwell Health, Hartford HealthCare. That's not even the full list. A lot of health systems are coming together to work on this. Do you see any challenges in getting everybody to sort of be focused on some of the same goals that you were talking about?

A: “I mean, of course, I think operationally this is going to be tough. Anybody, you know, who worked in healthcare knows that there are a variety of different settings, and we will have to figure out a way of how we team together. But what I am very encouraged by is the fact that everybody has a shared mission here, and once you speak to the people, you know, that are part of the consortium, I mean, just the burning passion they have of getting this right, I think will allow us to do this.

“One of the things we're doing in this consortium is we're teaming up on specific projects, so we will have a group, let's say, working on workforce, one on guardrails, one on outcomes. So hopefully we'll make sure we each focus on the core passion for that group, and I think that would be the only way to make progress. The good news, by the way, is that collaboration is not new to healthcare. I mean, that is how medicine is progressing, right? We all go together and research together, and we're putting out these research publications, conferences. I mean, the whole point of peer review, right? It's putting it out there for everybody to see and validate. That's kind of the same concept.”

Q: You've been working with hospitals and health systems on AI for a little while now. Do you see hospitals and health systems incorporating it more broadly, moving away from the pilot phases or the initial testing, and really moving towards these enterprise-wide solutions?

A: “I think there is a broader theme from pilots to enterprise implementations, from point solutions to platforms. AI is, first of all, becoming a board-level mandate. If you've engaged with a health system board, it is very much top of mind. But more than that, I think the realization that it is transformative to the business is key. The new thing that is happening, I would say in the last year and a half, is that clinical AI and diagnostic AI are becoming part of that same mandate for AI.”

Q: What advice would you offer to hospitals and health systems that are looking to expand the use of AI, especially in the clinical arena? Because I think most health systems at this point are realizing AI is part of the future, but how do they expand the use of AI successfully in patient care?

A: “I think AI is much more of an enterprise strategy decision than it is a point solution decision, and you have to treat it as such. And what are the implications of what I just said? I think it's two-fold. First is you need the decision-making infrastructure to make enterprise-wide decisions for clinical AI, and that is not trivial. Because who makes the call? Is it the clinician of a specific service line that is using it? Is it IT? Is it the CFO? Who is it? It's actually not an answered question, and every health system answers it differently.

“But I will say the health systems that are smart are those that have actually thought about this in advance and have created their internal mechanisms. A lot of the time, where AI gets friction is not because anybody thinks it's a bad idea, it's because you don't have the internal machinery to basically make that decision.”

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