Harnessing the power of data and AI at VCU Health
From ensuring patient privacy to leveraging AI for medical diagnostics, Alok Chaudhary highlights how VCU Health is positioning itself at the forefront of innovative patient-centered care.
October 29, 2024
New technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are transforming health care. (Getty Images)
By Danielle Pierce
In today’s healthcare landscape, data and artificial intelligence (AI) are playing an increasingly pivotal role, revolutionizing how health systems approach patient care, research, and operational efficiency.
While artificial intelligence itself has been around for decades, it has become a hot topic lately with the invention and use of more advanced AI technological platforms, especially in the health care setting.
At the helm of these advancements at VCU Health is Alok Chaudhary, VCU Health’s inaugural chief data and AI officer (CDAIO). Chaudhary, who started in his role in July 2024, oversees the strategic integration of data analytics, AI, and emerging technologies across the academic health system.
Alok Chaudhary started in his role as VCU Health’s inaugural chief data and AI officer in July 2024. (Sara McCloskey, Enterprise Marketing and Communications)
“Creating a data-driven culture involves every employee of our organization, not just my team and me. Recent technological advancements have ushered in a golden era in health care for us to leverage AI to improve operational efficiencies,” he explained. “But AI is not a magic wand. We have to be deliberate about optimizing workflows and processes in our business and clinical applications. AI brings enormous potential to us but it’s upon us to ensure our data is ready for AI.”
VCU Health News spoke with Chaudhary about his new role, how AI is transforming health care, and the opportunities and challenges that come with implementing these groundbreaking technologies.
As the chief data and AI officer, what do you oversee at VCU Health?
As the inaugural CDAIO for VCU Health, I provide executive leadership for strategic planning, development, implementation, and advancement of data analytics, AI, and emerging technology to enable VCU Health’s vision, mission, and goals.
As an academic health system, VCU Health is an amalgamation of patient care, research and education informed by the right insights at the right time.
How can AI be used in health care settings?
There are already several areas where AI is being used and evaluated in various health systems across the country. But I cannot stress enough how important it is to have good data. AI is only as good as the data that it is provided with, so it is particularly important that we have the right clinical and administrative workflows in place. AI is an assistive technology, meaning it is there to assist and to help but it cannot replace people, especially in the health care setting.
One example is medical diagnosis. Physicians assess a patient’s condition and come up with a diagnosis using clinical reasoning. This is an area where AI can be an aid to the physician diagnosing a condition based not only on a patient's symptoms and medical history but also by crunching vast amounts of evidence-based guidelines and research, the patient’s personal medical information, such as genome makeup and protein biomarkers, This level of data processing can easily be handled by AI at lightning-fast speeds and it’s only getting better.
These types of AI use cases will benefit both the patients and physicians because it has potential for more timely and accurate diagnosis and improved patient outcomes.
What kind of concerns does the use of this technology raise for patient care?
Every innovative technology has its own risks and rewards. AI is currently going through a hype cycle. There are huge benefits but there are risks involved as well.
In patient care, humans cannot be replaced by AI. However, AI can be used to assist doctors and nurses in clinical settings. So, we will see more adoption of AI in patient care, but it will be thoroughly vetted and validated by clinical experts and certified by regulators. It will also be an assistive tool for clinicians augmenting and complementing their work.
How does VCU Health ensure personal patient information is thoroughly protected in digital spaces?
Patient data privacy is extremely important for us. We have a lot of controls, audits, and checks in place to ensure patient data is always secure and protected. My team and I actively work with our colleagues in compliance, legal, and risk to ensure we are always compliant with our enterprise data protection policies and procedures.
We are always reviewing and enhancing these policies to ensure we stay ahead of the potential risks a new technology may introduce. For example, we have guardrails in place to ensure that widely available public chatbots are not utilized within our four walls as we do not want to see even a single incidence of someone accidentally sharing PHI on these platforms.
Are there any unique challenges or opportunities you foresee for VCU Health in integrating AI initiatives?
The challenges are similar to those in other health systems. AI must be used responsibly and ethically at all times in all health care settings. We don’t want to use AI just because everyone else is using it and because it’s trendy. We need to have use cases and business problems that only AI can solve.
It’s important to note that most business problems are not meant for AI to solve. Our focus should be on identifying problems and finding the right solutions. I usually see everyone looking for solutions through AI. However, we need to start with the problem, not the technology.
There certainly are opportunities and we are already exploring several of them. General awareness about AI at VCU Health is higher, which can help with ideation and adoption.
