VB Special Issue: AI and the future of health care

Artificial intelligence and health care both deal heavily with issues of complexity, efficacy, and societal impact. All of that is multiplied when the two intersect. As health care providers and vendors work to use AI and data to improve patient care, health outcomes, medical research, and more, they face what are now standard AI challenges. Data is difficult and messy. Machine learning models struggle with bias and accuracy. And ethical challenges abound. But there’s a heightened need to solve these problems when they’re couched within the daily life-and-death context of health care.

Then, in the midst of the AI’s growth in health care, the pandemic hit, challenging old ways of doing things and pushing systems to their breaking points. In this issue, we examine how the medical field is using AI and data to tackle the challenges of this extraordinary time.

From developing ways to handle massive amounts of tricky data, to using telemedicine and wearables to offer remote care, to challenging the pitfalls of automation bias, we’re encountering sea changes in health care. And because of the pandemic, the changes have to happen quickly.