Focus on back office and not on what doctors do

If you are interested in AI’s potential in healthcare, by this time you’ve definitely read about how the emerging technology so far has made a bit of a faceplant when it comes to clinical decision support and telling doctors what to do. IBM Watson should ring a bell.
But if AI (and deep learning and machine learning) aficionados and true believers set their sites a bit lower, then there is still a lot to be gained in improving healthcare. At least that’s what a couple of Silicon Valley VCs - Bob Kocher and Bryan Roberts, both partners at the Palo Alto office of Venrock - appeared to advocate at the StartUp Health Festival on Monday in San Francisco.
Roberts noted that to him AI becomes interesting when it can be broadly applied to healthcare instead of in just one area. He pointed to AI’s use in image recognition as an example of what he isn’t interested in. That’s because you have to use loads and loads of the data about the same thing to make the algorithms smart enough to detect patterns.