Improving AI's Positive Impacts on Health Care Across Europe
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The European health sector is harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the accessibility, sustainability, and quality of care. This shift is aimed at addressing challenges posed by aging populations, chronic diseases, and workforce shortages.
In a recent discussion hosted by the Center for Data Innovation, experts from the health-care industry discussed the role of AI in transforming the sector. Speakers included Yiannos Tolias, Legal Officer at the European Commission's DG SANTE, Ander Elustondo Jauregui, Policy Officer Digital Health (AI, data and digital health services) at the European Commission's DG SANTE, Chris Walker, Chair of the Working Group on Digital Health at EFPIA and Vice President, European R&D, Head of Regulatory Affairs & UK Sites Head at Amgen, MEP Maria-Manuel Leitão-Marques, Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age, and Elmar Kotter, Chairperson of the ESR eHealth and Informatics Subcommittee. The discussion was moderated by Christophe Carugati, Senior Analyst at the Center for Data Innovation.
AI is being employed in various ways to streamline operations, improve diagnostics, and facilitate remote and home-based care. For instance, AI platforms like BrainTrip provide fast, non-invasive cognitive assessments with high accuracy. AI also reduces the time spent by healthcare professionals on administrative tasks, allowing more patient-focused care.
Moreover, AI is assisting health-care professionals in complex procedures and is being used to deliver personalized health care to patients. It is also playing a crucial role in drug and vaccine discovery, helping to address the imbalance of skilled doctors to patients.
To foster AI development and data access, Europe is implementing several strategies. These include unified regulatory frameworks that balance innovation, patient safety, ethics, and data privacy, improved data governance and access, transparency and collaboration, promoting data literacy, and supporting startups and innovation ecosystems. The European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulation, for example, aims to facilitate secure data sharing while protecting privacy, enabling researchers and developers to access valuable health datasets to accelerate AI innovation.
The regulatory environment should address insufficient AI adoption, digital skills gap, and AI technology understanding in health care. The discussion aimed to identify what the health-care sector needs to create a positive impact with AI. The event was open for public participation via Twitter, using the hashtag #ourwebsite.
The discussion on increasing AI innovation in the health-care sector took place on February 4, 2021, from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM (CET) / 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM (EST). The event underscored the potential of AI to revolutionize the European health sector, making it more accessible, sustainable, and of higher quality for all.
- The European health sector is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform the quality, accessibility, and sustainability of care, addressing challenges posed by aging populations, chronic diseases, and workforce shortages.
- Speakers at a recent discussion hosted by the Center for Data Innovation, including Yiannos Tolias, Ander Elustondo Jauregui, Chris Walker, MEP Maria-Manuel Leitão-Marques, Elmar Kotter, and Christophe Carugati, discussed the role of AI in enhancing the health sector.
- AI is being used in various ways to streamline health-care operations, improve diagnostics, facilitate remote and home-based care, assist health-care professionals in complex procedures, deliver personalized health care, and help in drug and vaccine discovery.
- Europe is implementing several strategies to foster AI development and data access in the health sector, including unified regulatory frameworks, improved data governance and access, transparency and collaboration, promoting data literacy, and supporting startups and innovation ecosystems to accelerate AI innovation.
