Health system chief artificial intelligence officers are focused on safely and effectively implementing the emerging technology into their operations and patient care.
Becker's connected with Dennis Chornenky, chief AI adviser at Sacramento, Calif.-based UC Davis Health, on Oct. 3 at Becker's Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Conference in Chicago to ask the top three issues he's concentrating on in the next year. Here are his responses:
The AI governance gap. The first one is this growing AI governance gap that academic medical centers and health systems really have to think quickly and carefully about solving. This is the circumstance that happens when the evolution of technology rapidly outpaces the ability of regulations to keep up, which leaves this governance gap for regulated sectors and becomes a multibillion-dollar bottleneck, and also reduces the market size for AI vendors and limits our ability to have impact. So we need to do whatever we can to help bridge that gap through governance mechanisms and a posture that's more capable of adopting those technologies safely and efficiently as they come out, and being a lot more forward-looking about how we can position ourselves.
Workforce upskilling. An example might be something like AI agents, which is this concept of multimodal large language models that can perform many functions. That would include creating very good pitch decks, doing financial projections, research reports — all these things they maybe can do on their own with specialized applications. But nothing really brings them together in the form of an agent that you can talk to just directly using natural language and have them actually perform all those functions. So it's really starting to take over jobs, rather than just tasks, including jobs like junior consultants or junior investment bankers, really coming for the intelligentsia, so to speak.
So how do we position for something like that as a health system, especially a public entity like the University of California, with implications on job displacement? How do we make sure we're taking the humans that we already have, upskilling them and helping them to do more high-value work, and helping them to learn how to use these technologies to amplify their existing capabilities and so forth? So the second one is workforce upskilling to ensure that our staff and clinicians are adequately prepared to take advantage of these technologies.
Health equity. And then the third one that UC Davis Health — and a lot of UCs — are very focused on is questions around health equity, and how we can continue to ensure more equitable processes and approaches to care delivery, so that we're continuing to get better at identifying any kind of disparities within healthcare delivery, and we're applying technologies to help address, mitigate and reduce those disparities, and making sure that we're very careful not to apply any technologies that have the potential risk of amplifying those existing disparities.
So looking at social determinants of health and how we can apply more understanding around that into clinical workflows and relevant information for physicians at the point of care. One of the ways we're doing that is by participating in consortia like VALID AI, which actually has a working group focused on social determinants of health. Lots of health systems and industry partners are part of that, looking at how we can start providing better tools to our health system, to tell system members that UC Davis Health is part of helping address those social determinants of health and health equity challenges.