Susan Monarez Explains How AI Will Accelerate Better Health Outcomes for All

EXCERPT:

MONAREZ: "We think about advancing AI for health care in a number of different facets. So, some are direct to the patients, what tools and what capabilities can we develop to help them really understand where they are in their health care journey and empower them to make great decisions. We also think about AI from the provider side. So, how can we help providers better understand their patients? How can we help providers optimize their time within the health system as they’re seeing patients, as they’re trying to make complex decisions to create the conditions for improved patient health outcomes? We also think about AI from the defensive side. So, we understand that there is a great vulnerability within the health ecosystem. More and more is coming online in the internet of things that are going to have an incredibly positive effect, but we also know it creates vulnerabilities. And so we’re using that same AI technology to help defend against those vulnerabilities, to anticipate the negative implications that are happening within the health systems, and to try to stay ahead of it. ARPA-H takes on the entirety of the healthy ecosystem. It’s not just biomedical research, it’s not just resilience systems, it’s not just investing in the tech of the future. It is all of those. And what we do is we actually go out and we seek these incredible innovators, we call them our program managers, and they come to us and they say, you know, here the big problems that we’re seeing in the health ecosystem space. We will fund anything across the health ecosystem, so long as it helps further our mission, which is to improve health outcomes for everyone.”