The former CEO of the American Telemedicine Association, Jonathan Linkous, has joined forces with medical textbook and journal publisher Mary Ann Liebert to launch a group to help healthcare organizations address the challenges of implementing advanced technology from artificial intelligence and automation to robotics.
The new group comes into being at a time when machine learning, a form of AI, is becoming more widely used or at least piloted by the healthcare sector, as health tech companies adopt different ways to use it to speed up analysis of large amounts of data. But adoption has been limited by the need to better understand how the algorithms behind machine learning tools arrive at their analysis.
The Partnership for Artificial Intelligence and Automation in Healthcare (PATH) is designed to bring together health systems, payers and regulators to find how these technologies can improve the delivery of medicine, reduce costs and expand access to healthcare services to millions of people across the globe, according to a news release from the new group.
The group plans to highlight emerging innovations so as to improve understanding of these new technologies and how they can be harnessed to advance patient care. PATH also plans to establish priorities for navigating barriers such as regulatory hurdles, provider and consumer acceptance, and payer policies, according to its website.
“AI and related innovations have already enabled industries such as banking, aviation, and entertainment to grow, provide higher quality products, and allow consumers greater choice,” Linkous, PATH CEO, said in the news release. “With spiraling costs, increasing need, decreasing resources, and rapidly advancing technologies, healthcare desperately needs to catch up.”
PATH’s advisory board includes Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health CEO Stephen Klasko, who is also the editor of PATH’s journal Health Care Transformation; Jay Sanders, CEO of the Global Telemedicine Group; Sue Siegel, Chief Innovation Officer with GE and CEO of GE Innovations; Rick Valencia, Qualcomm Life president; and Yulun Wang, InTouch Health founder and president.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
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