Cleveland Clinic has launched the Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence

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Cleveland Clinic launched the Center for Clinical Artificial Intelligence last week to develop applications of artificial intelligence (AI) that can improve patient outcomes, lower costs, and advance the field of AI in medicine.

Cleveland Clinic's new AI center will offer its researchers, data scientists, and clinicians a centralized hub to develop AI research projects into clinical improvements.

Here's what it means: Cleveland Clinic's AI center is part of the broader trend of US health systems and hospitals racing to develop and deploy AI.

"It's likely that healthcare will be the [industry that is] most disrupted by AI over the next decade," Director of Cleveland Clinic AI Center Dr. Aziz Nazha shared with Business Insider Intelligence. Considering the level of expectation about AI's potential for disruption, it's no surprise providers are pouring resources into the tech. For example, health firm execs pinned investing in AI and analytics as a top IT spending priority for 2019, and the majority (54%) of execs plan to increase their IT spending by at least 10%. Cleveland Clinic's announcement mirrors that of UCI Health System, which launched an AI center in July 2018.

The bigger picture: Despite the hype, few hospitals have translated AI into improved business outcomes.

Effective AI implementations by US providers are scarce. Although there's high interest and activity around AI in healthcare, there's still not a lot of value or implementations, Dr. Nazha said. Cases like that of Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System - which reduced its time to diagnose internal head bleeding by 96% using a machine learning algorithm - are still the exception, not the norm. For example, while 53% of US providers say their organizations are using AI and data visualizations for clinical decision support, just 7% of respondents say their organizations are "extremely" effective in using AI, and only an additional 19% say they are "very" effective.

Here's how Cleveland Clinic anticipates its AI center will increase the likelihood its investments in AI are successful:

• The center should boost its ability to extract value from AI projects by increasing collaboration and communication among previously siloed Cleveland Clinic AI projects. While hospitals often have physicians working on separate AI projects, there aren't necessarily resources linking these projects, Dr. Nazha said. Creating a collaborative space for these physicians to share notes and tools could help Cleveland Clinic expedite and publish projects it's developed internally.
• And the Cleveland Clinic should have an easier time attracting talent with AI in healthcare expertise. Nazha highlighted that talent in this space is scarce; it's uncommon for individuals to have both a clinical background and AI expertise. Forming a designated center for clinical AI could attract new employees who fit this mold, cementing Cleveland Clinic as an AI leader and increasing the likelihood it develops clinically impactful AI projects.

Here's the industry opinion, as told to Business Insider Intelligence:

On where hospitals should focus early applications of AI: ". . . Go after high-value use cases of AI first, especially if [a hospital] is engaged in value-based care. Use cases like avoidable admissions, avoidable emergency department visits, all-cause readmissions, and sepsis can not only have a material impact on clinical outcomes but also have an associated cost impact." - Lonny Northrup, Sr. health informaticist at Intermountain Healthcare

On how the Cleveland Clinic identifies and validates analytics vendors: "First, we insist on a no-cost proof of concept: We're willing to expose a limited amount of Cleveland Clinic data to a vendor - in a controlled environment - to give them the opportunity to show us what they can do. Then, we have clinical experts and data analytics experts take a look at their results. If there's value or merit there, we move on to a pilot program . . . and if the pilot program is successful, we move to contracting." - Tim Crone, medical director of Cleveland Clinic Enterprise Analytics

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