MY PREDICTION: The AI Revolution Will Hit Health Care

Don't fear the robo-doctor. AI is going to help Canadian hospitals work faster and smarter for their patients.

- Amol Verma

completed medical school in 2009, just as health-care providers were switching from paper charts to digital records.

The early versions of these digital records created an explosion of new documentation about each patient-when I started as a medical resident at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital in 2011, it often took me an hour to sift through a patient's file. Despite having so much more personalized data than ever before, it was difficult to use this digital information to provide high-quality care.

But technology was evolving around us-including early AI systems. By 2017, I was a staff physician at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. There, I teamed up with clinicians, computer scientists and administrative leaders to build CHARTWatch, an AI tool that tracks more than 100 health metrics stored in digital records, like heart rate, blood pressure and lab tests. By looking at these data points and comparing them to data from previously admitted patients, it predicts which patients are most likely to deteriorate, then sends alerts to doctors' and nurses' mobile devices. The alerts don't indicate why the patient was flagged, but they do bring the patients to clinicians' attention.