Advancing Algorithmic Care

The keynote lecture was delivered by Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor Ezekiel Emanuel, whose main message to the audience was “We must be humble,” emphasized that AI must be seen as supplementing physician care, not replacing it. 

Emanuel said that the biggest problems in medicine are not a lack of data or information about patients but in using data to help change behaviors, both in patients and their caregivers. Virtual medicine and AI, Emanuel emphasized, are not something that can elicit a behavioral change on their own but can help change behaviors when used in connection with other treatments and interventions. “We need to think about how data and AI will intersect with habit formation and reward. It’s not fundamentally a data or a machine-learning problem; it’s a people problem, which is why it‘s so difficult,“ he said.