The U.S. spends more money on healthcare than any other high-income country on earth. Still, Americans have a comparatively low life expectancy and often face more barriers to care.
Companies from Google to Amazon have built tech tools to address certain healthcare issues, and healthtech startups received over $40 billion in venture funding in 2021 alone to try to mitigate the problem. But new tech has yet to create something that can address the myriad nationwide problems facing the healthcare industry.
Artificial intelligence is perhaps the latest tool that advocates hope will address those issues.
New drug development, mental health chatbots and streamlined administrative work are just a few of the ways AI is already being put to use. But at least one of the dilemmas, critics say, is that AI-powered tools don’t have the right guardrails to handle sensitive data.
In North Carolina, the tech has been used for everything from diagnosing lung disease to drafting messages from your doctor.
We sit down with two experts about the latest advances in AI and medicine in North Carolina and nationwide.
GUESTS
Dan Janies, professor of bioinformatics and genomics and co-director of Computational Intelligence to Predict Health and Environmental Risks (CIPHER) at UNC Charlotte
Marschall Runge, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan and former dean of the University of Michigan Medical School
