Hospitals team up to speed advances in diagnostic AI

Health systems have been utilizing artificial intelligence to help doctors detect diseases, and now a group of hospitals are banding together to share best practices.

Twelve U.S. hospital systems have teamed with Aidoc, an AI healthcare company, to form the Diagnostic AI Consortium. Aidoc provides an AI-powered platform to help hospitals improve diagnostic imaging.

Elad Walach, co-founder and CEO of Aidoc, tells Chief Healthcare Executive® that the partnership is designed to spur the greater use of AI and to develop practical solutions that mesh with hospital workflows. In an interview for the Data Book podcast, Walach says he hopes the consortium will develop techniques that will lead to better and faster diagnoses.

“I think every healthcare system realizes they can't do this alone, which is why we all banded together to say, 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,” Walach says.

Seeking better outcomes

The consortium includes some of America’s largest health systems: Advocate Health, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Hartford HealthCare, Houston Methodist, Mercy, Mount Sinai Health System, Northwell Health, Northwestern Medicine, Sutter Health, University of Florida Health, University Hospitals of Cleveland, and WellSpan Health.

Warner Thomas, president and CEO of Sutter Health, says the consortium seeks to spur more innovation with AI in patient care.

“We came together to set the direction, share best practices, learn from one another and create better answers for the patients we serve,” Thomas said in a statement.

Jeffrey A. Flaks, president and CEO of Hartford HealthCare, said in a statement that he sees working with the collaborative as a way to ensure that AI technologies “are developed and implemented responsibly, with a clear focus on improving outcomes for patients and advancing the future of care."

"Artificial intelligence has tremendous potential to enhance the quality, safety, and efficiency of care by equipping clinicians with more timely, meaningful insights that support better decision-making,” Flaks said in the statement.

Creating a playbook

While the consortium is planning to work together, Walach says the lessons they develop will be shared beyond the hospitals participating in the collaborative. Walach says it will be available for any health system “that wants to implement big, scalable, diagnostic foundation models.”

“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, to the adoption playbook, and ideally out of this, we create a repeatable playbook,” he says.

Walach also says that the consortium is going to look at maintaining patient safety as systems use AI more often in diagnostic imaging. He also says that he still sees keeping doctors in the loop as essential.

He says, “You could have the best model in the world, but it's about how do we ensure that the human plus AI work together? What mechanisms do we have to intervene and ensure that the human is still reviewing? What mechanisms do we have to know if, for example, some humans, you know, are overly biased and require some training?”

Walach says there will be some complexity in the collaborative involving a group of large healthcare organizations.

But he’s confident that the members of the consortium have a common vision and will share important insights.

“What I am very encouraged by is the fact that everybody has a shared mission here, and once you speak to the people 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,” he says.

Speaking to that desire to move forward, Walach says he was surprised at how quickly health systems are hoping to make some breakthroughs in the work with the consortium.

Walach shares that he initially told some of the health systems CEO in the consortium that he thinks they will see a lot of progress a few years down the road. But he says that some of the leaders said they envisioned a much shorter runway, saying, “In a year this should look completely different.”

“We should already have a lot of outcomes in a year,” Walach says. “Which I agree. I think the impatience is healthy here.”