Artificial intelligence dominated many of our conversations at RSNA’s 2023 annual meeting. A number of business leaders told us that, as workloads increased along with demands for faster turnarounds, they are looking into AI-based products to help resolve the burdens impacting their practices and centers. Despite this, many still saw AI as a buzzword because what AI/ML actually is and how it works was still a mystery to them. Without this core understanding, a few expressed how this further complicated matters for them when trying to match AI offerings to their business needs.
Confusion with AI Offerings
Business leaders shared several challenges with us. The first is that they’re seeing an increasing number of new AI offerings with little distinction, at least on the surface; furthermore, as many companies are from newly-minted, leaders paused to consider the long-term viability of doing business with them. The second challenge is having to match the applicability of AI products to the population that they are serving; leaders shared that some AI products were trained on data from a different country with unique population characteristics (because that’s where the company originated). The third challenge for leaders is understanding how they could measure the return on (or value of) their AI-product investment, leaving them with questions like, “If this AI product focuses on lesion detection, can it detect the degree of it?”, “What will it cost me to run this AI product?”, and “Does the AI product have performance analytics?”. Many were left without answers and without a clear path forward.
A Solution to Measure AI Product Value
As thoughts were shared with us, we conveyed the power of Foundations™ and its ability to ingest clinical, financial, and operational data from a variety of sources. When applied to AI products, Foundations™ can measure the utility of AI investments and express their performance through intuitive, objective dashboards. It can report how often the AI product was used, as a simple measure, but through the use of actionable insights, it can also scale to address more complex business and clinical needs; e.g., the effectiveness of AI products compared to a human counterpart, trends or patterns among patients diagnosed with AI products, and workflows that were developed because of the AI product insights provided by Foundations™. This information is vital to helping a business leader evaluate whether they’d want to continue investing in a specific AI product. While many leaders were focused on looking into clinical AI-products (e.g., pixel AI), they found Foundations™’ ability to incorporate AI/ML as a solution to solve business problems to be intriguing – especially as they began to recognize the need to automate the management of data because they were exceeding the limits of manual management through Excel.
Closing
Our conversations at RSNA 2023 were productive and informative, especially with the bustling post-COVID pandemic crowd. We appreciated the number of visitors that came by after remembering us from other shows. In addition to sharing concerns about staffing shortages and interests in updating their PACS technology, our booth visitors shared details about the challenges they were experiencing with investigating and adopting AI products. In return, we shared the capabilities of Foundations™ – as a solution to help measure the performance of AI products and also as a solution to forecast demand and model capacity. Many thanks to all our booth visitors and the new people that we met. If you didn’t have a chance to meet us at RSNA, please reach out to us at any time. Until then, see you at the next one!
Recent Comments