Artificial Intelligence

The IT giant’s global chief medical officer and vice president of healthcare speaks candidly on healthcare and what HIMSS20 attendees need to know.

It's hard for me to believe, but I’ve been at Penn Medicine for 13 years. There has been a remarkable amount of change, growth, and learning that has occurred both within my organization and in myself during this time. Upon entering a new calendar decade, I thought I'd share a few reflections on past achievements, lessons learned – and thoughts to pave the way forward in setting new goals to keep trailblazing on the technology landscape. I find that it’s important as a leader to express gratitude. Doing so creates a high achieving mentality at work and builds connectedness, perhaps even solidarity, which can pay dividends and even transform the organization toward increased productivity. The Information Services achievements that I am most thankful for at my organization include these key items: First, I’m thankful that we successfully implemented our integrated electronic health record. This achievement significantly enabled the continuity of patient care and seamlessly unites our patients’ data in the ambulatory, inpatient and homecare settings. Second, I’m thankful for the high performing Information Services team that gives 100% each day - dedicated toward achieving our departmental mission aligned to support our enterprise goals. By building a strong team vision, culture, and establishing solidarity, we have achieved a 96% retention rate over the past seven years.   Next, I’m thankful for Penn Medicine’s leadership that participates in our information services governance, sets institutional priorities and provides our teams with the resources necessary to continue to be leaders in health care delivery.  I’m also thankful for our vendor partners whose employees develop some of the most functional and reliable technology and software solutions to assist our caregivers in their daily operations.  Lastly, I’m most thankful for all of my business partners in the healthcare IT industry that work collaboratively with me and members of the Information Services team to design, develop and implement solutions that meet the institution’s objective to deliver world class patient care, education and research.  Through these contributions and collaborations, my organization has changed in ways we never dreamed of at the beginning of this past decade. As we look forward to the next decade, I can only imagine the changes that will take place. I foresee significant advancements occurring in mobility, imaging, telemedicine, virtual reality, 5G/6G, artificial intelligence, data privacy and security, genomic sequencing and translational research. From my perspective, these are just a few of the factors that will shape the next decade: In the near term, Penn Medicine’s Information Services team is focusing our efforts on driving more value out of the technology assets in which we have made investments. Further optimizing our electronic health record to be more intuitive and useful for our clinicians; Expanding efforts to further engage our patients in the management of their care; Delivering timely analytics to decision makers across the enterprise to improve on-the-ground decisions and drive desired behaviors; Integrating our research and patient care efforts to deliver personalized patient care solutions; Ensuring that we engage our most valuable assets, our employees, with the most up-to-date technologies to enhance their career opportunities.  The next decade is sure to bring an accelerated rate of change to the healthcare industry. Like the metamorphosis that has taken place in other industries, healthcare technology will be the catalyst for provider organizations to succeed in the ever changing world of healthcare. Mike Restuccia is the chief information officer of Penn Medicine.

Japanese giant Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma and Oxford-headquartered AI-driven drug discovery company Exscientia yesterday announced that they have created a new compound which is in the process of entering human clinical trials in Japan. This is the first time a new precision engineered drug generated by AI is entering Phase 1 human clinical trials. The trial aims to measure the efficacy of the drug for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).  WHY IT MATTERS According to Exscientia, developing a single drug is around $1.75B and discovery makes up a third of that cost. This entire project was five times faster than typical discovery – it took 12 months, vs. the typical five years, with the candidate compound found within 350 synthesized compounds vs. the typical 2500 compounds.  WHAT HAPPENED The drug, which is named DSP-1181, was created through the joint research by Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma and Exscientia. The former provided its experience and knowledge in monoamine GPCR drug discovery and the latter applied its Centaur Chemist AI platform for drug discovery. THE LARGER TREND MIT's School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company are also working together to drive innovation and application of AI applications for healthcare and drug development, HealthcareITNews recently reported. Last December, French AI startup Iktos and skin-health focused pharmaceutical company Almirall announced a research collaboration in AI for new drug design.  ON THE RECORD "We are very excited with the results of the joint research that resulted in the development of candidate compounds in a very short time. Exscientia's sophisticated AI drug discovery technologies combined with our company’s deep experience in monoamine GPCR drug discovery, allowed us to work synergistically, delivering a highly successful outcome. We will continue to work hard to make this clinical study a success so that it may deliver new benefits to patients as soon as possible," said Toru Kimura, Board of Directors, Senior Executive Officer and Senior Executive Research Director of Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma in a statement.  Andrew Hopkins, CEO of Exscientia, said: "We believe that this entry of DSP-1181, created using AI, into clinical studies is a key milestone in drug discovery. This project’s rapid success was through strong alignment of the integrated knowledge and experiences in chemistry and pharmacology on monoamine GPCR drug discovery at Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma with our AI technologies. We are proud that our AI drug discovery platform Centaur Chemist has contributed to generate DSP-1181 and look forward to its progression as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder."

The five-year project will focus on enabling faster medical research innovations, protecting against global health crises and improving access to care, the company says.

The vendor surveyed provider organizations and found a walk-don’t-run approach to artificial intelligence – administrative, then clinical – unfolding across the industry.

Whole Brain Foundation President and founder Charles Atkinson says the technology envisioned by psychologist B.F. Skinner decades ago is now here with AI.

Digital health requires a healthy data pipeline that’s aggregated, normalized, and deduplicated, and ready to be integrated into workflows across the health ecosystem for care coordination, analytics and machine learning.

Improvements in patient outcomes and population health will be enabled as a culture of data-driven decisionmaking takes root and quality improvement processes mature.

These trends are good news for provider organizations looking to improve care, gain efficiencies and trim costs, an InterSystems vice president predicts.

While cloud vendors offer a basic infrastructure environment, it’s up to the healthcare client to design it and own it, says BIDMC's Manu Tandon.