Taking a Closer Look at the Potential of AI in Healthcare

Natural Medicine Journal Podcast

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating headlines and dinner table conversations, and many of us are interested in understanding the impacts it may have on our lives and our practices. Emerging research points to the many ways we can expect AI to play in healthcare in the coming months and years, and it would be a good idea for healthcare providers to take heed.

This roundtable discussion features three experts: Tina Kaczor, ND, FABNO, who is a medical editor and naturopathic oncologist; Marina Sirota, PhD, who is a researcher and biomedical informatics expert and associate professor with University of California, San Francisco (UCSF); and Charlotta Lindvall, MD, PhD, who is a researcher, assistant professor at Harvard, and the Director of Clinical Informatics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

They discuss current research on AI in healthcare, and explore the concerns that need to be addressed before employing AI fully in the healthcare system.

About the Experts

Tina Kaczor, ND, FABNO, is editor in-chief of Natural Medicine Journal and the creator of Round Table Cancer Care. Kaczor is a naturopathic physician board certified in naturopathic oncology. She received her naturopathic doctorate from the National University of Natural Medicine and completed her residency at Cancer Treatment Centers of America. She is also the editor of the Textbook of Naturopathic Oncology and cofounder of The Cancer Pod, a podcast for cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, and everyone in between.

Marina Sirota, PhD, is an associate professor and the acting director at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at UCSF. Prior to that, she worked as a senior research scientist at Pfizer, where she focused on developing precision medicine strategies in drug discovery. She completed her PhD in biomedical informatics at Stanford University. Sirota’s research experience in translational bioinformatics spans nearly 20 years, during which she has coauthored over 170 scientific publications. Her research interests lie in developing computational integrative methods and applying these approaches in the context of disease diagnostics and therapeutics with a special focus on women’s health. The Sirota laboratory is funded by the National Institute on Aging, the National Library of Medicine, the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, Pfizer, March of Dimes, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Dr Sirota also is the director of the AI4ALL program at UCSF, with the goal of introducing high school girls to applications of AI and machine learning in biomedicine, and she leads the outreach and advocacy efforts at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.

Charlotta Lindvall, MD, PhD, is a practicing palliative care physician, assistant professor, and director of Clinical Informatics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She leads a cross-disciplinary research team of physicians, nurses, and computer scientists to develop AI to extract patient-centered outcomes from clinical narratives and conversations. ClinicalRegex, a software developed by her lab, is used to identify text-based primary outcomes in multiple clinical trials involving tens of thousands of patients in the United States. She leads the Clinical Informatics AI strategy at Dana-Farber and is a technical expert on AI for the National Quality Forum. Dr Lindvall has received multiple awards and prizes, including a NPCRC Junior Investigator Award, a Sojourns Scholar Award, and an Innovation Award from the National Quality Forum. Funding for her research includes grants from the Cambia Health Foundation, the Veteran Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health.