Harnessing GenAI with a Human Touch

The average hospital generates 50 petabytes of data a year – that’s 50,000 1TB hard drives – and the amount of data generated in healthcare is growing by 47% per year. Yet, only 57% of that data is actually used for making decisions, because too much of it is unstructured, unwieldy, or simply difficult to access.

But that is rapidly starting to change—and we are fast approaching an inflection point when it comes to Generative AI (GenAI) in healthcare.

With the surge of new technologies and digital innovation, hospitals, health systems, and healthcare companies are pairing GenAI with data and analytics to better serve patients globally.

At the same time, without proper governance and supervision, GenAI can pose risks to businesses and society. That’s why all companies should approach the use of AI responsibly, with careful governance and an innovative mindset – and especially those in healthcare, where there’s the potential to significantly impact patients’ lives.

The promise of GenAI in healthcare

In healthcare, we’re seeing the potential for GenAI across a wide range of applications, including driving competitive advantage, accelerating innovation, augmenting human capabilities, and enhancing decision-making.

Consider the example of a person who undergoes screening for a lung tumor. Traditional AI can look at radiology scans and help physicians identify and classify a patient’s tumor based on knowledge learned from millions of labeled historical records.

In contrast, GenAI could potentially take in multiple inputs —those same scans, the patient’s medical history, research articles, billions of records (both labeled and unlabeled) — and using a neural network of potential responses, analyze this data, and propose a diagnosis and treatment plan.

We still have a long way to go before we can consider GenAI to be fully reliable for these types of applications in healthcare. And, regardless of how this technology advances, it is essential we keep a human in the middle for decisions and responsible actions.

However, you can see how GenAI can lead to significant benefits to society, helping doctors arrive at diagnoses faster, easier, more accurately — and allowing them to treat more people.

Combining innovation with responsible governance

That’s why healthcare companies across the board are exploring how to bring this technology to life, and 强生公司 is not an exception. We’re doing so responsibly, with careful governance, and in compliance with applicable regulations. This enables us to navigate critical ethical concerns, avoid perpetuating any biases or inequities found in training data, protect the privacy of our customers and patients, and mitigate the risk of fake information making its way to the people we serve.

Our teams are experimenting with various AI platforms, and we have seen many use cases with promising impact in areas such as augmented employee capabilities, pipeline advancement, regulatory compliance, and quality improvements.

Some examples include understanding and summarizing global regulations and policies as they evolve over time, or identifying areas of unmet needs, particularly in rare diseases. The latter insights can inform our R&D pipelines and investment opportunities and can also help us to bring our healthcare solutions to as many patients as possible, as early in their disease journey as appropriate.

Also, earlier this year, we launched our own internal GenAI Intelligent Chat with a corresponding governance process, being mindful of the risks associated with this technology. Using this tool, our employees can boost their expertise, analyze business information, and generate summaries or pose spontaneous inquiries, all without the risk of exposing this content online or contributing to the training of public large language models.

At the current breadth and scale of AI innovation in healthcare, we should expect all healthcare workers will need to become “bilingual” in tech and health over the next several years, and we are excited to see where these new capabilities will take us.

By embracing responsible AI practices and staying focused on our purpose, our industry will continue to innovate to make a bigger and more positive impact on the lives of the people we serve.