AI for Diagnosis

An entrepreneur, investor, and technologist, Khosla was founding CEO  of Sun Microsystems.[..] “Medicine has improved a lot as a practice,” Khosla said. “But I think it’s time to take this practice of medicine and turn it into the science of medicine.”. To make that happen, Khosla thinks we have to hand medical expertise over to the machines [..].

Khosla said you can diagnose disease with a single biomarker—the chemical signature of sickness—or you can diagnose disease by looking at 300 biomarkers. You can look at the patient in front of you and compare them to the last few you’ve seen, or you can scan a database of 100 million patients for the last hundred or thousand with the same condition.

Harvard, Stanford—it doesn’t matter. No doctor can deal with data like that [..].

Right now, we have to specialists for everything. None of them talk to each other as much as we’d like. According to Khosla, Medicare patients have seven major conditions on average. Wouldn’t it be better to have AI look at those conditions comprehensively—and one doctor, not seven, talk the results over with the patient?

This new model will flip healthcare on its head. Instead of pinballing between specialists, patients will get focused communication from a primary care doctor or even a nurse. That single point of contact will have time to clearly inform and comfort them.