Wharton@Work

October 2024 | 

The AI Prescription: How AI is Transforming Health Care

The AI Prescription: How AI is Transforming Health Care

The future of health care isn't a distant vision — it's already here, reshaping how doctors diagnose, treat, and manage patient care. From AI-powered diagnostic tools that catch diseases earlier to predictive algorithms that personalize treatment plans, artificial intelligence is beginning to drive significant improvements in health care outcomes today.

But, as Wharton professor of Health Care Management Marissa King notes, “creating the algorithms is the easy part. Turning the algorithms into something that actually transforms health care and securing support from key stakeholders are the challenging parts.” King continues that although AI has the greatest potential to make an impact in health care, it's often the hardest place in which you can think about leveraging it due to numerous challenges including data fragmentation, privacy concerns, and the consequences of getting AI wrong being “far more significant than they are in other domains.”

King, who serves as faculty co-lead of the new Wharton Healthcare Analytics Lab, says Wharton is “uniquely positioned to help move the needle. One of the biggest impediments to getting algorithms implemented is a lack of stakeholder alignment. Concerns and incentives vary greatly among providers, insurers, and pharma and medical device companies. And those concerns are certainly different than those coming from an informatics perspective. Bringing everyone to the table to have honest discussions about what seems to be working and where there are points of consensus, and to surface some of the concerns and address them head-on, needs to happen in a neutral space that's oriented towards learning. For those reasons, the Wharton Executive Education program [Health Care Leadership and Management: Leading Through Change] is uniquely positioned to help us start thinking about how we can overcome the barriers to implementation for AI to more effectively transform care.”

Embracing AI for Strategic Advantage, Not Crisis Response

Given the significant benefits of using algorithms — including more accurately interpreting medical imaging (think X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs), streamlining routine tasks to allow clinicians to spend more time with patients, and predicting risk to prioritize care — overcoming barriers to their use is important. Add to that the worsening shortage of health care workers, a critical threat to public health that directly impacts access to timely and quality care, and adoption of AI in health care becomes a critical imperative.

The World Health Organization predicts a global shortfall of 10 million health care workers by 2030, which will naturally result in longer wait times, overburdened staff, and a decline in quality of care. The health of rural and underserved populations that are already facing limited access to health care will be particularly affected. In the U.S., the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) projects a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034, which will also significantly hinder access to care, particularly as the population ages and the demand for health care services increases.

King explains that even as demand for AI tools to ameliorate many of these issues increases, human reluctance to change remains a formidable challenge. “If you look at how organizational change naturally unfolds, there's always some natural human resistance. But particularly around AI and health care, there's a huge amount of resistance across the board, in part because the cost of getting it wrong is so much higher than it is in other sectors.”

“But,” King continues, “the thing that we also know about organizational change is that at some point the pain becomes greater than the source of resistance. That's when you start to see wide-scale adoption. And within health care right now, there are so many challenges around clinician shortages and burnout that within the clinical space in particular, we're already to the point where the cost associated with delivering care, and the pain and difficulty of doing that with staff shortages, has really started to propel the adoption of AI.”

Like many changes that come out of necessity rather than after careful weighing of the risks and benefits, the limited adoption of certain algorithms at the point of care means the possibility for problems is higher. “AI is happening in health care whether we like it or not,” says King, “so the hope is that we get ahead of the curve and have a more thoughtful and holistic perspective on the best way to allow it to transform care, rather than being reactive by using it to deal with health care shortages and other challenges that our health care is really struggling with right now. AI is just a tool, and it could be positively transformative, but it also can lead to some pretty significant unforeseen challenges unless we're really careful about what we're doing in this space.”

As King stresses, the time to develop a thoughtful and holistic perspective on AI in health care is now, and Wharton is leading the way. The school is bringing together world-class faculty in the new Healthcare Analytics Lab who've been thinking deeply about the issues across disciplines and are collectively starting to navigate this emerging challenge. And those thought leaders are engaging with a range of health care stakeholders in the Health Care Leadership and Management program. “One of the important benefits of that program is not only the contributions of the faculty, but also being able to discuss with like-minded peers in real time the transformations that AI can bring to health care. The faculty are there to help curate the conversation with what we know from the best emerging evidence in the field. But it’s when their expertise comes together with the day-to-day experience of other participants who are navigating similar challenges that the conversation really becomes elevated. And the time to have that conversation is now.”