STAT’s guide to how hospitals are using AI to fight Covid-19
The coronavirus outbreak has rapidly accelerated the nation’s slow-moving effort to incorporate artificial intelligence into medical care, as hospitals grasp onto experimental technologies to relieve an unprecedented strain on their resources.
AI has become one of the first lines of defense in the pandemic. Hospitals are using it to help screen and triage patients and identify those most likely to develop severe symptoms. They’re scanning faces to check temperatures and harnessing fitness tracker data, to zero in on individual cases and potential clusters. They are also using AI to keep tabs on the virus in their own communities. They need to know who has the disease, who is likely to get it, and what supplies are going to run out tomorrow, two weeks from now, and further down the road.
Just weeks ago, some of those efforts might have stirred a privacy backlash. Other AI tools were months from deployment because clinicians were still studying their impacts on patients. But as Covid-19 has snowballed into a global crisis, health care’s normally methodical approach to new technology has been hijacked by demands that are plainly more pressing.
There’s a crucial caveat: It’s not clear if these AI tools are going to work. Many are based
