UC Davis Health is embracing AI
As the promise and pitfalls of generative AI in health care emerge as top-of-mind topics — with the number of research papers on the subject seemingly doubling every few months — UC Davis Health has simultaneously increased both its activity and influence around AI.
The health system is recruiting prominent, veteran digital leaders; leveraging AI analysis to enhance diagnosis and screenings; bolstering remote data collection to feed that analysis; pursuing AI solutions to reduce provider burdens (and burnout) from medical documentation; and playing major roles in national public-private collaboratives that seek ethical, equitable adoption of the technology.
It’s all with an eye toward preserving, and even enhancing, the human or personal touch in health care and health decision-making, says UC Davis Health CEO David Lubarsky, M.D., M.B.A., F.A.S.A.
“Doctors and nurses will always be in charge of the decision-making,” Lubarsky said in his leadership message in this issue. “AI is artificial intelligence, but it’s not. In health care, it’s actually augmented intelligence — it’s about giving your doctors and your nurses more tools to make better decisions for the patients.”
UC Davis Health has been a telehealth pioneer since the 1990s, and earned honors for the past decade as a “Most Wired” health system for high-level, innovative uses of information technology. That influence now continues in the digital and AI space as well.
Chief Information and Digital Health Officer Ashish Atreja, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.P., A.G.A.F., who joined UC Davis Health from Mount Sinai in late 2020, was named among the nation’s top 30 health care IT influencers in 2022 by HealthTech magazine and among the top “35 chief digital officers of health systems to know” last year by Becker’s Hospital Review. Atreja is known for establishing innovation hubs within academic medical centers to build and test disruptive digital health technologies, and credited with coining the term “evidence-based digital medicine.”
Dennis Chornenky, M.B.A., M.P.H., a former senior advisor and strategy consultant in AI and emerging technology for the White House, was also named chief AI advisor to UC Davis Health last summer. In his newly created key role, Chornenky, with his consulting and technology firm Domelabs AI, leads efforts to establish strategy and governance frameworks that ensure UC Davis Health’s approach to AI is safe, ethical, and meets emerging regulatory compliance standards. He previously led initiatives on AI policy, digital health, and national security across two presidential administrations.
A variety of UC Davis Health researchers and clinicians are already using AI for disease patterns, looking for lifesaving insights in areas ranging from cancer screening and stroke diagnosis to opioid surveillance. Meanwhile, health system leaders and faculty are involved nationally in forging collaborative ways to advance AI adoption in an enlightened, equitable way.
The University of California Health system, which includes UC Davis Health and other UC medical centers, was a nonprofit founding partner of the prominent Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), along with health systems like Mayo Clinic and Stanford Medicine and industry partners such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Last year the coalition issued a “Blueprint for Trustworthy AI” to identify and propose solutions to issues that must be addressed for trustworthy health AI, such as risk of bias.
In October, UC Davis Health along with other UC Health systems also launched VALID AI, a member-led collective of health systems, health plans, non-profit associations, coalitions, and technology and research partners that aims to help facilitate and accelerate responsible Gen AI in health care.
Following a White House executive order on AI last fall, UC Davis Health was one of 28 provider and payer organizations that made voluntary commitments to help move toward safe, secure, and trustworthy purchasing and use of AI.
“We’re striving to not only improve patient outcomes through digital health and AI, but to help be a game-changer for the entire health care sector,” Atreja said.
UC Provost Katherine Newman invited Atreja to speak at a February UC AI congress that brought together minds from across the UC’s 10 campuses, three national labs and six academic health centers to discuss the university’s role in shaping AI in service of the public good.
“I see the University of California as the University of Collaboration, and that’s how we need to lead the world, by bringing us together,” Atreja said in an accompanying story.
