Kaiser Permanente funds healthcare projects using AI and ML

Artificial intelligence in healthcare is growing quickly as seemingly every company now says it's using the technology to help fix inefficiencies in the system: the global artificial intelligence in the healthcare market, which was valued at $16.3 billion in 2022, is expected to grow to reach $173.55 billion by 2029, a CAGR of 40.2%.

Of course, no player in the healthcare system wants to be left behind in such a fast growing market, including Kaiser Permanente, so the company announced on Monday that it has awarded five health care organizations with funding through its Augmented Intelligence in Medicine and Healthcare Initiative (AIM-HI) Coordinating Center. Each of these projects are pursuing research projects deploying AI and machine learning algorithms to enhance diagnostic decision-making in health care.

AIM-HI is part of The Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, which conducts, publishes and disseminates epidemiologic and health services research with the aim of improving the health and medical care of Kaiser Permanente members and society at large. The stated objective of AIM-HI, meanwhile, is to "advance research methods, identify best practices, and build capacity for effectively implementing and rigorously evaluating the use of AI/ML algorithms for diagnostic decision-making in real-world settings."

Out of the more than 120 applications submitted, the following five recipients were chosen:

• Dr. Cesar Termulo Jr., MD, Associate Medical Director at Parkland Hospital; his project involves generalizing an AI/ML model for pediatric asthma care in safety net health settings.
• Dr. David Ouyang, MD, a cardiologist and researcher in the Department of Cardiology and Division of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; his project is around high throughput precision identification of cardiac amyloidosis in a civerse population
• Dr. Sivasubramanium Bhavani, MD, MS, Assistant Professor at Emory University School of Medicine; his project is precision resuscitation with crystalloids in sepsis (the PRECISE trial)
• Dr. Fatima Munoz, MD, MPH, Associate Vice President of Health Support Services at San Ysidro Health; her project involves diabetic retinopathy screening point-of-care artificial intelligence.
• Dr. Peter J. Embí, MD, MS, Chair, Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; his project involves advancing novel approaches and best practices for effective AI-enabled diagnosis using randomized trials, algorithmovigilance, and proactive risk assessment. 

“While AI has great potential to improve health care, there are relatively few studies looking at the actual impacts of its use in real-world practice,” Dr. Embí told VatorNews. “Through this project, we will develop much-needed knowledge for using and monitoring AI tools across different health care settings and patient populations to ensure safe, effective and equitable care.”

"We are excited to prospectively study the impact of AI on clinical care. While many AI algorithms have been described in retrospective research, there are few prospective trials that can more accurately assess clinical impact and accuracy of AI. This is particularly important for screening algorithms," said Dr. Ouyang. "For cardiac amyloidosis, a rare and often missed diagnosis, we previously developed and published an AI algorithm to opportunistically screen using echocardiograms. We are excited to use AIM-Hi’s funding to evaluate its performance across four diverse sites across the United States."

"IV fluids are the most common treatment in hospitalized patients. We look forward to testing whether our AI algorithm can improve outcomes in patients with sepsis by guiding IV fluid resuscitation," said Dr. Bhavani.

This story was updated to include a quote from Dr. Bhavani

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