A two-day conference on AI and learning health systems became more eventful than expected when the water system shut down following a powerful storm in early September at the Omni Amelia Island Resort. Yet more than two dozen speakers and nearly 80 attendees persevered and completed the full event.
Held for the second time, this specialized conference seeks to put patients in the center of a health care process that continuously learns from data. There is one major problem.
“We don’t have a learning health system today,” said keynote speaker Peter Embi, M.D., chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. A national or large-scale LHS intends to foster continuous learning and improvement based on data and the experience of patients.
Embi shared a personal story from 2017 when he was repeatedly misdiagnosed with migraines. He believes that informatics could have provided better diagnostics, but ultimately, he applied his knowledge and status as a doctor to discover a rare, 10-centimeter tumor, called a pheochronocytoma, that required four surgeons to remove.
Embi regrets that the health system where he was treated did not learn from his experience. Ideally, he said, a system would learn from every patient.
Second Event for AI and Learning Health Systems
The conference opened on September 5th with a welcome from Elizabeth Shenkman, Ph.D., the chair of the University of Florida’s Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics (HOBI ). “This meeting brought together key thinkers and leaders to share ideas about advancing the learning health system using patient and stakeholder engaged partnerships and advanced data capabilities, including the use of artificial intelligence and other tools,” Shenkman said.
The conference was co-hosted by the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network, a multi-state partnership with a coordinating center in HOBI. One of the network’s partners, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, sent a large contingent.
A second keynote talk was delivered by Brian Mittman, Ph.D., a researcher with the multi-state health provider Kaiser Permanente. He stated that learning health systems need to function at regional or national levels, and he bemoaned our fractured health system and its “tower of Babel” problem that fosters miscommunication.
Mittman encouraged more research on implementation science and more introspection on how healthcare is organized. He anticipates that the growth of learning systems will result in more accurate and more complex health interventions.
Panels of Expertise
As de-humidifiers buzzed on the hallway carpets that had been flooded during the storm, several panels convened to provide multiple perspectives on pressing health issues (view the full agenda here). Experts addressed “how-to” operate learning health systems and how AI could accelerate their adoption.
Following an afternoon poster session, the two best presenters were announced at a dinnertime event. HOBI master’s student Aman Pathak won with a poster on cancer and natural language processing, and UF M.D. candidate Mariah Jordan won with a poster on applying data to identify hepatitis C.
View poster by Aman Pathak
Extracting Thyroid Nodules Characteristics from Ultrasound Reports Using Transformer-based Natural Language Processing Methods
View poster by Mariah Jordan
Identifying Clinical and Molecular Determinants of Health Disparities in Hepatitis C
A noteworthy group of four attendees were UF citizen scientists. One of them gave a powerful testimony during a panel on social determinants of health. Kristie Hill, a HOBI receptionist, recounted 15 years of health struggles and a perilous pregnancy before receiving a correct diagnosis of Crohn’s disease.
The conference concluded with a talk on AI by Dianne Babski from the National Library of Medicine and a panel of industry professionals from Epic, Plug and Play, and Microsoft.
A portion of participants also attended a one-day pre-conference LHS workshop that featured Mittman from Kaiser Permanente and Barbara Evans, Ph.D., who has dual appointments in the UF Colleges of Engineering and Law.
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