How AI Is Transforming The Healthcare Industry

This week I sat down with Ross Muken , CFO and COO of SOPHiA GENETICS on how AI is transforming the healthcare industry.?

With the rate of innovation within healthcare happening at an exponential rate, this weeks episode is a great insight into how C-suite leaders can balance strategic direction, emerging technologies and profitability.

Check out a snippet from our conversation here:

How do you see the future of AI within Healthcare evolving, and what will the impact be on your industry as it stands?

It's really fascinating and obviously our business is very steeped in AI and machine learning, so this is very core to what we do and speaks to a lot of what SOPHiA has been focused on for the last decade as you think about healthcare.

Overall it's certainly a field that has been at the tail end or at the nascent stages of adoption of new technologies. So the impact AI can have on healthcare broadly I think is quite substantial. It now depends on what type of AI we are talking about, because I do think once you move into a regulatory environment, some of the newer pieces like we can talk about generative AI become a bit more challenging dependent on what the end use is.

And there's still so much we haven't done on existing data that hasn't been unlocked but ultimately the potential impact is significant, I think the biggest challenge is going to be how do we comfortably introduce AI into many aspects of the clinical workflow or how do we diagnose and treat patients such that it adds efficiency to the system without losing the clinician who really is still at the heart of treating many patients. And then ensuring we don't alienate the patient or get challenged from a privacy or cybersecurity perspective.

So again in healthcare when we talk about the risks, they're always substantial and so you know the pushback you're going to get for the adoption of anything new, particularly something challenging to understand for some as AI is always going to be. But I do think the impact can be profound, I almost liken it to the internet.

If you go back to the late 90's when we were trying to understand the concept of the internet many believed it would be huge, but then for every Amazon we ended up with a pets dot com, and there's going to be the same thing here. There's going to be a lot of things in AI that people get very excited about that when we fast forward 10, 15 years they didn't turn out to be so impactful. And then you're going to have another group of things where you look back and you're like wow that really changed the shape of the industry.

I think it's still quite early from our perspective, harnessing all of the world's data to treat patients better is a pretty noble mission, and there's many others on this journey. I just think that that has such huge impact because even in the very early stages of this journey when you're talking again about extending life.

There's many areas where before clinicians would see something in a patient and really have no understanding of why they were behaving or reacting or responding in a certain way and sort of provide them answers and this is often how we win business. People come to us and they say we can't figure out this corner case of a patient, can you help us and then we use our AI and machine learning tools and our DDM platform to really help them better characterise and understand that patient and then you've converted the doctor that thinks AI is scary.

So I think you know we're doing a lot of the groundwork today that will allow for the advancements at scale to have that big impact but it will take some time to build in many of the different parts because there is a trust element to it.

Check out the full conversation here: https://bit.ly/3PzoKiD