Leaders across healthcare, academia and technology form new coalition to transform healthcare journey through responsible AI adoption

REDMOND, Wash., Jan. 13, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — On Thursday, leading public, private, educational and research organizations across the U.S. healthcare and life sciences industries announced the formation of the Artificial Intelligence Industry Innovation Coalition (AI3C). The coalition brings together the Brookings Institution, Cleveland Clinic, Duke Health, Intermountain Healthcare, Microsoft, Novant Health, Plug and Play, Providence, UC San Diego, and University of Virginia with the goal of maximizing technology to provide recommendations, tooling and best practices for AI in healthcare.

“The goal of the newly created AI3C is to establish a pragmatic coalition with public and private organizations to advance health by identifying and addressing significant societal and industry barriers,” said Patty Obermaier, vice president, US Health and Life Sciences, Microsoft. “I am excited about the launch of AI3C and working with its distinguished board as we continue the momentum toward serving the needs of patients and communities through AI innovation.”

The AI3C board, composed of volunteer senior executives acting as advisors, will work to co-create AI solutions for positive societal and healthcare outcomes, identify and set the AI strategy and vision for a variety of projects, and track the success of AI adoption in the industry. Each member organization has nominated its own AI ambassadors to serve as regional leads and drive programs. All members have an equal voice in the way the coalition operates and is governed.

The AI3C intends to apply AI to resolve significant challenges in business such as:

• General economic and industrial challenges – including research transfer, industry standards and funding instruments
• Digital skills and employability – including organizational and cultural challenges, as well as labor policies
• Data privacy – including data access and shared innovation

Overall, the AI3C objectives are to accelerate AI innovation and adoption by:

• Showcasing emerging AI tools
• Gathering industry-specific AI use cases, best practices and research feedback
• Transforming the AI workforce
• Preparing students for careers in AI and data science  

To achieve these goals, AI3C members will focus on providing a comprehensive program for responsible AI education and upskilling. Moreover, the AI3C will engage with the healthcare community through white papers, new tools and programs, and social media outreach to make AI more applicable and impactful. The coalition will host quarterly meetings and events to transparently communicate the resolution and progress of solving key challenges through AI adoption.

The AI3C will provide recommendations and advice on a wide array of AI topics including responsible healthcare innovation, health equity and workforce transformation to reduce clinical fatigue. More details about the coalition’s programs and its impact will be available later this year. The AI3C follows in the footsteps of the National Coalition for Artificial Intelligence in Financial Services, which was launched in December 2020.

“Meeting the urgent need for new health technologies requires diverse partners coming together across sectors. With perspectives from AI practitioners, healthcare professionals and the research community, the AI3C can guide collaborative projects that accelerate the translation of frontier technologies from research to solution development, to implementation,” said Ashley Llorens, vice president and managing director, Microsoft Research and Incubations.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Perspectives from AI3C member organizations

“AI in health care provides us powerful tools to address systemic challenges by identifying true root causes. At Duke Health, we are committed to eliminating inequities in clinical care and reducing social barriers to a healthy life through the Collaborative to Advance Clinical Health Equity, led by Dr. Richard Shannon. AI will empower us to redesign the care delivery system at the population level and I look forward to creating health equity for our generation and future generations.” – Shamyla Lando, chief technology officer, Duke Health

“At Intermountain, we’ve made significant advances in applying AI and machine learning methods in the diagnosis, treatment, and automation of routine tasks. AI helps us create a frictionless experience for our caregivers and our patients. We believe this coalition will create the suitable space for AI healthcare leaders to have the necessary dialog to advance AI-enabled care process models across settings of care for our patients and communities. By coming together, we can help influence the delivery science to help translate technical capability and best practice into clinical and operational impact.” – Greg Nelson, Area Vice President for analytics services, Intermountain Healthcare

“Novant Health is honored to be a member of the AI3C. Our involvement exemplifies Novant Health’s commitment to innovation and helping our communities be as healthy as possible through efforts such as reducing health inequity, creating unbiased personalized medicine and improving access to care. The future of health is boundless when we collaborate across industries, apply advanced technology and ensure responsible innovation.” – Karl Hightower, chief data officer and senior vice president, data products and services, Novant Health

“We at Providence feel that the responsible and equitable implementation of AI will be a critical element of healthcare transformation and to achieve our vision of Health for a Better World. We applaud Microsoft for bringing this coalition together and are excited to partner with these esteemed institutions to drive progress on how AI can be a force multiplier for good in healthcare.” – Brett MacLaren, chief data officer, Providence

“As the role of AI continues to grow in our society and economy, this community of independent scientists would be a conduit between healthcare industry and technology companies, academia, policy makers and the general public, ensuring faster development of AI solutions and smoother adoption of such technologies by end users.” – Niam Yaraghi, nonresident senior fellow, The Brookings Institution

“Historically it has taken up to 17 years from the inception of an idea to the market introduction of a novel therapy. The COVID-19 pandemic made it very clear this is too long. We need to shrink that, and advancing AI can help us accelerate research as historical computational limitations of storage, handling, and analyzing data have not been equipped to handle the volumes of data we now generate. The potential for AI used clinical research is immense. It will enable us to ask questions in new ways, speed discovery, and begin individualizing medicine.” – Matthew Kull, chief information officer, The Cleveland Clinic

“UC San Diego has already pioneered a number of AI models with direct impact on clinical care and biomedical research and recognized the importance of proper training in this area, with programs at the undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels. This consortium will help catalyze equivalent developments all around the country in the area of ethical and trustworthy AI for healthcare and life sciences. This is very timely.” – Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at UC San Diego Health and council faculty at the UC San Diego Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute.

“AI has enormous potential to advance health care through improvements in the treatment and prevention of disease. I am particularly excited to explore the ways AI can be used to improve health equity and ensure everyone has access to the latest advances in machine learning-enabled diagnostics and clinical assessments.” – Donald E. Brown, senior associate Dean – University of Virginia

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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.