Two Little Letters, One BIG Impact: How AI is Influencing Healthcare Reporting

Artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to make major headlines across a number of industries - and healthcare is no exception. Tech giants like Google, IBM and Microsoft are dominating the conversation as they develop deep learning techniques that can revolutionize the way diseases are diagnosed, treated and even prevented. As the industry continues to rapidly adopt the capability, end-user stories are also becoming more common with world-renowned hospitals publicly expressing their triumphs and fails with the technology.

Fred Bazzoli, Editor-in-Chief at Health Data Management, on IBM’s business approach for AI in healthcare:

“IBM is focusing on expansion in this arena as a long-term strategy in its business. Toward that end, it’s accumulated some assets through acquisitions that gain more mileage from the core AI technology in Watson Health (this is the area that we focus on at HDM). From our view, the IBM Watson approach in healthcare seems to aim at focusing on demonstrating value in various use cases, while marketing the technology to large clients that are hoping to use AI in their healthcare operations to drive efficiencies, improve care and drive down costs, thus making them more competitive as the industry transitions to a value-based approach.”

Tom Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief at Healthcare IT News, on how AI will impact reporting:

“We are seeing considerable interest among Healthcare IT News readers in not just Watson articles but the overall trend of what AI, cognitive computing and machine learning can bring to hospital operations and the science of medicine. We've already started writing more about the technologies, added an Artificial Intelligence topic page to our site, and I have no doubt we will continue that for the foreseeable future.”

Anonymous healthcare IT reporter on how to make an AI pitch standout:

“As an editor of a healthcare trade publication focused on the healthcare professional/c-suite audience, pitches with money, percentages or other numbers in the headline catch my interest. My audience is looking for statistics, data and other current trends that will help them make key decisions for their institutions in the future. I am interested in hearing from high level executives about the key trends in the industry today and their predictions for the future -- including how AI will impact the hospital's business and physician's practice. I am less interested in the technical aspects of products/systems or technology and more interested in the outcomes and numbers behind it (ie, potential savings, current implementations).”