Xconomy convened an outstanding group of innovators in healthcare and artificial intelligence for a half-day conference in Seattle earlier this month. As testament to the excitement around this topic, our event was sold-out with a lengthy waiting list.
Those who made it in the door of Cambia Grove, our event host, were rewarded with a wide-angle look at the ways machine intelligence is poised to transform several facets of healthcare from research to patient care. Our Healthcare + A.I. Northwest speakers, including startup founders, computer science luminaries, and many healthcare practitioners, were also quick to pierce the hype.
There are major disconnects to fix before machine intelligence can truly be unleashed on healthcare. One of the biggest is around data—making it accessible and usable, and ensuring that it won’t perpetuate or exacerbate existing biases as new technologies impact the delivery of healthcare. Other speakers highlighted the fact that new technologies—the electronic health record, in particular—too often come between medical professionals and their patients. There’s a huge opportunity in reducing the burden of EHR data entry on physicians, and machine intelligence technologies such as speech recognition could help.
Other new technologies, such as Semantic Scholar, a search engine developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, are designed to help medical practitioners and scientists sift through the rapidly proliferating corpus of research in their fields.
We covered so much more at the event, and Xconomy will continue to follow this hot topic in our reporting in the weeks and months to come.
A big thank you to Cambia Grove, our platinum sponsor Product Creation Studio, and our speakers, many of whom stayed throughout the event and networking sessions to interact with the audience. Speaking of whom, we’re grateful to the people who attended this event, asking great questions and staying engaged until the end.
