UCSD aims to put AI research into practice

The Jacobs Medical Center at UC San Diego Health

UC San Diego Health on Monday announced its new Institute for Applied Health Intelligence, a new initiative it says will combine AI research and clinical resources to scale data-driven, equitable care into medical practice.

The new institute "embodies our strategic vision to transcend traditional silos, foster a deeply collaborative culture and deliver a transformative impact in education, research and care," UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said in the announcement.

While transformative healthcare technologies hold the promise of more reliable health outcomes across populations, UC San Diego's new Applied Health Intelligence Institute aims to unite more than 50 faculty and 750 trainees to push the limits of real-world medicine at the university health system and achieve it as soon as possible.

Six of its schools – School of Medicine, Jacobs School of Engineering, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Rady School of Management, Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, and the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science – will begin working with UC San Diego Health to integrate their health intelligence research into care delivery.

"If research is the brain and clinical care is the body, this institute will serve as the spinal cord, connecting our schools and care delivery into one responsive, intelligent organism," Dr. Amy Sitapati, the institute's inaugural director and the Lawrence S. Friedman Professor of Population Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said in an announcement.

Technologies such as artificial intelligence can turn health data into insights, but tackling health system challenges at scale with them requires coordination across its research infrastructure.

"The convergence of computational power and biological insight represents the next frontier of medicine," Dr. John Carethers, vice chancellor for health sciences, said. "By erasing the traditional boundaries between engineering, medicine, business and data science, we are creating a collaborative ecosystem where the most complex health challenges are met with a unified, university-wide response."

Three strategic pillars form the mission of the new Applied Health Intelligence Institute:

Specialized bodies, including the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Division of Biomedical Informatics within UC San Diego's School of Medicine, also led by Sitapati, will support implementation in clinical environments.

The institute will also partner with the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, the Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity and the Jacobs Center for Health Innovation at UC San Diego Health, the university said.

Other academic-based healthcare organizations have taken similar approaches to moving AI from research into reality.

Two years ago, Mount Sinai Health in New York City launched the Center for AI and Human Health at its Icahn School of Medicine with 40 principal investigators and 250 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, computer scientists and support staff to take an interdisciplinary approach to combining AI with data science and genomics.

Last year, the American Medical Association created its new Center for Digital Health and AI to ensure that physicians would remain involved in the development and deployment of AI technologies and to help shape policy conversations.

"Our goal is to harness innovation responsibly and effectively, so it improves patient care and reduces unnecessary burdens on physicians," the AMA had said in a statement at the time.

Previously, Dr. Karandeep Singh, UC San Diego Health's chief health AI officer and associate CMIO for inpatient care, spoke at length with Healthcare IT News about approaches to managing AI accountability within a health system, and his process for working with others on health AI use cases.

"Each of those steps requires me to have some level of partnership, some level of someone who has domain knowledge and expertise," he had explained. "But what I have to do is make sure when a clinician notices a problem, we can think about and brainstorm what in the upstream processes might be creating that problem so we can fix it."

Singh added: "On the AI side, you need to understand how the healthcare system works so as you're working with health leaders, you're not just translating and giving them your excitement about a specific method."

"In healthcare, the most critical gap isn't usually a lack of innovation, but the 'last mile' – the systemic challenge of integrating new discoveries into the daily flow of patient care," Patty Maysent, CEO of UC San Diego Health, said in a statement.

"Leveraging the intelligence of this institute will enable us to reduce clinical variation and eliminate preventable harm, ensuring that we deliver the highest standard of care to every patient, every time."

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.Email: [email protected]Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.