Can AI make health care more efficient?

People won’t be surprised to learn that AI could improve the accuracy of diagnosis, expedite the rates of drug discovery, or even replace some (or many) activities typically done by doctors. However, can AI save the health care system money? That is the question asked by a recent article in The Economist titled “Can artificial…

Quotation of the day: On technological progress

You’re mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better. And actually it will, I think, by itself degrade actually. If you look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt and they’re able to make the…

Is Uber a substitute for ambulances?

According to a paper by Moskatel and Slutsky (2019), the answer appears to be ‘yes’. In this paper, we ask whether UberX’s entry into a city caused substitution away from traditional ambulances for low‐risk patients, reducing overall volume. Using a city‐panel over‐time and leverage that UberX enter markets sporadically over multiple years, we find that…

Hospital of the future

The Economist‘s recent article “Prescription for the future” describes some new trends in health care treatment and predicts what the hospital of the future will look like.  Some excerpts are below: When I think of the hospital of the future, I think of a bunch of people sitting in a room full of screens and phones,”…

Will technology replace nurses?

Many people have feared that robots, computers, and other forms of technology will take people’s jobs. Conventional wisdom holds that healthcare workers have been largely immune from these technological changes to date. However, a new paper from Lu, Rui and Seidmann examines whether technological advances–specifically computerized provider order entry (CPOE)–affects employment at nursing homes. Using…

Paging Dr. Watson

In the future, will your recommended cancer treatment be decided by a computer?  That is what IBM hopes with the launch of their Watson for Genomics project.  CNET reports: Typically, finding the appropriate treatment for a specific patient means sequencing his or her genome — the complete DNA structure packed into a single cell —…