When the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs inked a five-year pact to collaborate with Flow Health for advancing artificial intelligence, the startup stepped into the national health IT spotlight.
Healthcare IT News caught up with Flow Health CEO Alex Mishkin to discuss his vision for AI, cognitive computing and machine learning, what a federal contract means to a young company and what the incoming Trump administration might mean for innovation in America.
Q: What does partnering with the VA mean to an emerging company like Flow Health?
A: The VA approached us and said ‘imagine what you can help us do with our data.’ It’s super exciting to be working with the largest integrated clinical data set in the United States: 22 million unique people, spanning 20 years so it’s a rich longitudinal data. With that we want to understand people before the onset of disease, through treatment, and hopefully when they’re cured. You can't personalize individual treatments until you get a more granular definition of the disease you’re treating – better understanding the similar characteristic of one patient against a population.
Q: Are there specific diseases you will be focusing on in the work with the VA?
A: The long-term goal is to advance artificial intelligence — use knowledge as a basis for more advanced AI research like artificial-general-intelligence such as human reasoning — but along the way I think there’s the opportunity to save a lot of lives at the VA.
Q: Heading into HIMSS17 what aspects of AI should attendees be thinking about?
A: My general view is that we need to engage with as many partners as possible, academic medical centers, large tech companies because as a whole Americans want to help veterans. You can’t make America great again without helping Veterans.
Q: Since you evoked the political slogan of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign, what impact do you think the new administration will have on innovation relative to healthcare?
A: I think there’s been a lot more clarity in the past several weeks and we’re going to see more deregulation, I think it’s a step in the right direction, FDA will be a softer hand, which I believe will enhance innovation. Meaningful use, for instance, was well-defined regulation and we have the same type of EMR we had 10 years ago, there’s just greater penetration in the market. But it would be hard for any new EMR to break into today’s market. Less regulation is a great thing.
Q: What is the future of AI in healthcare?
A: Deep learning, for the most part, is really making unstructured data machine readable – that’s data integration. That is where 90 percent of the focus is now and that will become a commodity. In five years that will just be expected, I don’t expect that to be anyone’s primary business. The future of AI in healthcare is around personalized decision-making and more clinical validation at every step.
Twitter: SullyHIT
Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com
