AI’s Evolving Role in Healthcare

Session: Algorithms Unleashed: The need to reinvent our role in delivering patient value

Presenter: Bharat Tewarie, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, UCB

Bharat Tewarie, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, UCB

Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in pharma are gaining quick momentum and showing greater promise than originally imagined, explained Bharat Tewarie, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, UCB. To prove his point, Tewarie offered several examples where AI is impressing even its strongest proponents.

In disease detection and prediction:

• IBM’s New AI Can Predict Psychosis in Your Speech
• Google’s new AI algorithm predicts heart disease by looking at your eyes

In best-case treatment options:

• Team Demonstrates Digital Health Platform for Department of Veterans Affairs

In R&D:

• DeepMind’s Superpowerful AI Sets Its Sights on Drug Discovery

However, Tewarie stressed, before AI can achieve maximum patient value, we need to look beneath the buzz and ask ourselves, “How do we get ready for this future? How can we connect data that exists within companies and then mine it?”

To bring AI successfully into the future, he said, we need to understand three things:

1. Technology is not an end; it’s a means to an end. It’s a tool to deliver patient value. So, we need to look at AI in terms of patient value and not merely as a way to play in an exciting field.
2. We need to understand that the same data is not universally accessible. “The data needed to generate patient value has to be stored and accessible to all, so we can meaningfully connect dots,” Tewarie said.
3. You have to have people who know how to achieve and handle all of this technology and data.

companies ready to invest in AI must never forget that this technology is a tool and the patient remains at the center of everything we do”

Point three is perhaps the most perplexing. Currently the tech giants employ the majority of AI experts. To be exact, he stated that 56 percent of today’s AI experts work in only six companies. “That leaves us with a shortage of AI experts. We need to see a new combination of how man and machine work together to deliver value to patients,” Tewarie said.

In closing his presentation, Tewarie drove home a strong message: “There is one thing technology will never be able to do. Enterprises still need to be able to generate patient value – from communication, leadership, cooperation, design, empathy, and emotional benefits. Because of that, companies ready to invest in AI must never forget that this technology is a tool and the patient remains at the center of everything we do.”

Session Takeaways

While pondering the need to reinvent our role in delivering patient value, Tewarie offers these points to consider:

• Why harnessing AI and Deep Learning is crucial if we want to deliver patient value
• How AI is impacting global workforces, freeing up companies to find new ways to deliver value to customers and how pharma can learn from this to deliver even more value to patients
• Why we need to have strategies to attract and retain AI talent as well as for the re-skilling our own employees, in the interest of developing the capabilities to harness AI appropriately for patients
• Why we need to reimagine and reinvent the role we as humans play in delivering value to patients.