On 23 January 2024, our Senior Consultant, Dr. Rabea Stockert, had the honor of giving an online training session on “AI in Healthcare – Technology & Market” for the European Commission, alongside Johanna Schmidhuber and Elisabeth Pachl from Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS. With over 300 participants, our session kicked-off a three-part training series on Artificial Intelligence in healthcare featuring experts from academia, industry, and EU institutions.
The training was organized by the CONNECT University, a knowledge-sharing flagship initiative of the European Commission’s Directorate General on Communication Networks, Content and Technologies (DG CONNECT) that aims to inform the EU staff and the general public about the latest digital trends and challenges which are highly linked with EU’s relevant policies.
The rise of AI-based technologies and applications is immense and offers great opportunities for the complex administrative and medical processes in healthcare. We are expecting disruptive changes for all stakeholders with the overall goal of improving healthcare and its access worldwide. Nevertheless, healthcare data and data processing are sensitive and AI in healthcare needs to be safe and trustworthy, making regulations and ethical frameworks indispensable. Within our session, we gave an overview about the current market perspective and the challenges and requirements for AI in healthcare.
1,2https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/tackling-healthcares-biggest-burdens-with-generative-ai
3https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334826/ai-in-healthcare-market-size-worldwide/
4https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/artificial-intelligence-ai-healthcare-market
5https://cms.wellcome.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/unlocking-the-potential-of-AI-in-drug-discovery_report.pdf
6https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/most-americans-dont-trust-ai-healthcare-setting-carta-survey-finds
Together with the experts from Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS, we emphasized that data is the foundation for unlocking the true potential of AI in healthcare. While there is an abundance of data collected, most of it remains inaccessible for structured analysis and AI-driven applications due to technical, data quality and ethical concerns.
Additionally, diversity is an important factor during all development steps. Biased systems can lead to devasting results, in particular in healthcare. Therefore, diverse development teams, security measures implemented in the algorithms itself and diverse but suitable data sets for the corresponding use case are essential.
We discussed how to tackle different obstacles on the roadmap to successful AI implementation and looking forward to upcoming progress within this field.
We extend our gratitude to DG CONNECT for inviting Flying Health and Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS via the CONNECT University program to share our insights from research and practical experience, addressing relevant questions about the current status and future of AI in European Healthcare. We appreciate the high interest of the different Directorates-General, as well as the wonderful support and organization by the DG CONNECT Team. The event underscored the importance of exchanging diverse perspectives on AI in the safety-critical healthcare sector, a dialogue Flying Health has long been engaged in within our network.
We are also interested in your experiences and opinions on the topic. Feel free to contact us at any time. We look forward to hearing from you.
Your contact person: Dr. Rabea Stockert, Senior Consultant at Flying Health
