With a room overflowing with attendees, “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Practical Applications in Eye Care Today” addressed a standing-room-only crowd, so it’s likely many of the readers of this inaugural edition of AI in Eye Care missed the event hosted by Jobson on Sept. 18, 2024.
From an educational program that promises to be a historic turning point, when those eye care professionals in attendance will remember where they were when the “AI Revolution” began, here are the highlights.
I started the discussion with an overview of the basic facts of health care delivery. We all have a job to do, and AI is a series of tools that may be able to help us do our jobs better and faster. We are at the precipice of a major revolution in how health care is delivered. A revolution where we combine AI with human creativity, clinical wisdom, experience, and empathy to arrive at more accurate predictions, diagnosis, personalized treatments, and new approaches to the age-old problem of access, quality, convenience, connection, and cost.
Artificial intelligence will increase the health care experience across all touchpoints and channels in a way that no preceding technology has ever had the capability to do. There is little doubt that AI will affect all parts of humanity, and maybe the greatest impact will be on the health care industry.
We were fortunate to have some of the leaders of the artificial intelligence revolution educate the audience about what they can likely expect from the future of AI. Here’s a summary:
What is AI, Really?
Dr. Masoud Nafey, OD, MBA, from MENT AI kicked off the meeting defining artificial intelligence and then providing an overview of how it could help the industry better organize and understand the voluminous data created every day. He described AI as a software tool that learns, reasons, and can solve problems. Different forms of AI, such as large language models, can help detect and respond conversationally about a variety of tasks. He reviewed the basics of machine vision and how machines can learn from visual examples, much as we do, through pattern recognition.
Dr. Masoud educated the audience about the different major classifications of AI, such as artificial narrow intelligence, the area we are largely just starting to explore now, as well as more advanced forms such as artificial general intelligence, which we are just starting to see examples of, and more futuristically, artificial super intelligence. He left us with a statement predicting that “AI is the greatest accelerator the world has witnessed.”
It’s About the Data: The Need to Know
Dr. Dena Weitzman, OD, FAAO, the director of Medical Affairs at Digital Diagnostics, presented the intricacies of the data needed to train AI systems. These datasets are what separates good from bad, known as the GIGO principle (i.e. garbage in equals garbage out). She educated the audience on how output quality is determined by the input quality and reviewed the challenges in building quality datasets. Dr. Weitzman reviewed what makes good data, how to avoid bias, and when to use retrospective data versus prospective data.
The Augmentation of Clinical Care
Dr. Rehan Ahmed, MD, MBA, who serves not only as the Chief Medical Officer of Blink by Globe Biomedical but also as co-editor of this eJournal, discussed how more patients, fewer doctors, rising costs, shrinking payments, and an explosion of data are creating the perfect storm and the perfect opportunity for AI to help augment health care delivery. Dr. Ahmed summarized the two main jobs of a provider – diagnose and treat. He then reviewed many of the tools to assist providers doing those two jobs such as technologies that help with diagnosis, machine vision tools, those that help with clinical decision making, and other related technologies.
In the therapeutics realm, he reviewed tools that will help personalize treatment plans as well as the exciting innovation of robotic cataract surgery. Dr. Ahmed also discussed how tools that help improve efficiency, such as chatbots, virtual health assistants, ambient listening devices, or scribes, can remove or reduce many of our administrative burdens such as scheduling, documentation, and more.
Unlocking Efficiency: Leveraging AI Tools for Operational Efficiency
Easy Anyama, CIO of FluoreSCENE Media and Founder of ODx Health, discussed operational tools to improve efficiency at a lower cost. He discussed how AI may be able to comb through patient health history and communications to improve the quality of clinical decision making. He also examined some of the technologies to improve our financial side by reviewing billing statements, contact lens orders, improving insurance authorization, and inventory. He also reviewed where generative AI such as ChatGPT may be used to help with marketing and education, as well as ways to optimize flow, payments, and orders.
The Evolution of Sales, Marketing, and Education
Dr. Howard Purcell, OD, FAAO, Diplomate, AAO and FNAP, President and CEO of the New England
College of Optometry, delighted the audience with an amazing presentation where he showed the audience a version of how the workplace might be transformed through predictive analytics and automation of routine tasks and how AI will impact the future of telemedicine. He also discussed how AI may change the way we learn with the help of AI tutors that can tailor learning on any subject and make material accessible to anyone anywhere.
By interacting with his own live avatar, he even hypothesized that an AI virtual heath assistant can answer questions and act as a patient advocate. Dr Purcell also reviewed how the sales and marketing process as we know it may completely change or even become obsolete in the next decade as the customer service process becomes more streamlined. He also laid out a future timeline with the 2030s being the era of AI empowerment and how that may cause a disruption of the current economic model in health care, as well as what societal shifts may occur in terms of the provider-patient relationships.
Democratizing Screening & Diagnostics with AI
Sunny Virmani, Ophthalmology Group Product Manager for Google Health AI, began his presentation with a reality check for all of us that there are a lot of ideas, but translation to actual programs is a much slower process. It is largely because it not only takes lots of data but also great quality data to train our AI models. He argued that the cause of this data conundrum lies in the fact that the data input was gathered by humans, often with certain inherent biases.
Furthermore, the output data of the AI model is then ultimately supervised for accuracy by humans to be sure that the training and output data are correct, which may again have inherent biases. He also discussed the fact that models not only need to be completely accurate, but they actually need to be relevant and usable in real world settings. Then there is the actual challenge of onboarding and dealing with both the actual capabilities and limitations of the tool, as well as the perception of the capabilities and limitations to deal with. If all those checkboxes are met, the tool actually needs to positively impact the health care system in which it is being used.
Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Eye Care Industry
I then concluded the meeting with some general thoughts about how AI will change the eye care industry. I see a future where coding, billing, processing, and reimbursement are all automatic and transparent and a slightly more distant future where value-based medicine makes these variable numbers based on performance.
I see a future where knowledge primers for the right and interested people will be integrated at exactly the moment those people need them and can effortlessly access that information. I see a future where Personal Health Advocates (human and chatbot) in the form of virtual assistants will help improve education, literacy, and compliance. I also see a time when data for real-time strategic business decisions is presented to leaders, not something they have to go and seek.
In summary, the packed house of our industry innovators and thought leaders were exposed to various technologies, both theoretical and practical. The response was so positive that Jobson is planning a similar program again at Vision Expo West 2025, details to come.
For more details from the AI program, click here for a PDF of the event’s proceedings piece: “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Practical Applications in Eye Care Today.”
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