Rob Currie will moderate a policy discussion on AI related to the medical industry:

A turning point occurred last year when the FDA approved the first ‘Fully Autonomous AI Driven Clinical Diagnostic’. The IDx system diagnoses diabetic retinopathy, requires a high school level of education to operate, replaces the ophthalmologist, and itself has an AMA billing code and malpractice insurance. I’ve attached a slide deck from IDx discussing the ~8 year process they went through with the FDA to validate and approve this system. First question from the audience: ‘How do you approve updating the weights based on all the new data collected?’ – ‘We are working on that with the FDA and it’s not clear how without repeating the full clinical trial’. This is at the nexus of building a learning health system and AI. As further background read a recent survey article by Dr. Eric Topol, High-performance medicine: the convergence of human and artificial intelligence (also author of the excellent ‘The Patient Will See You Now’). These are both on the ‘for’ side of the debate, with some important details on the ‘how’. Welcome discussion here or at the meeting on ‘why we shouldn’t’ or why this is ‘too early’.