An Introduction to Healthcare AI

Healthcare and AI have an intertwined history dating back at least to the 1960's when the first 'cognitive chatbot' acting as a psychotherapist was introduced at MIT. 

Mark Braunstein
Professor of the Practice Emeritus at Georgia Tech, Scientist, Australian eHealth Research Centre

Abstract:  
Healthcare and AI have an intertwined history dating back at least to the 1960's when the first 'cognitive chatbot' acting as a psychotherapist was introduced at MIT.  Today, of course, there is enormous interest in and excitement about the potential roles of the latest AI technologies in patient care.  There is a parallel concern about the risks.  Will human physicians be replaced by intelligent agents?  How might such agents benefit patient care short of that?  What role will they play for patients. We'll explore this in a far-ranging talk that includes a number of real-world examples of how AI technologies are already being deployed to hopefully benefit those physicians and their patients. 

Bio:
After a long career as a health informatics entrepreneur, Dr. Braunstein taught it at Georgia Tech for 12 years before he retired in 2020.  Since then, he has been a Visiting Scientist at the Australian eHealth Research Centre, the health informatics lab within Australia's national scientific organization, CSIRO. He is also developed and helps teach an innovative Digital Health Software Project course at the University of Queensland. He is a frequent lecturer, the author of over 50 peer reviewed papers and five books, the most recent of which is Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7s API is Transforming Healthcare, a definitive text on the applications of the latest interoperability standards to healthcare.