Twelve U.S. health systems, along with vendor Aidoc, have collaborated to form the Diagnostic AI Consortium, aimed at developing shared standards for how diagnostic AI is evaluated and governed. In this article, originally published by our sister publication, Healthcare Innovation, David Raths discusses the consortium in further detail with Aidoc’s CEO and co-founder, Elad Walach.

Read an excerpt of the article below.

Aidoc’s Elad Walach on the urgency of building a diagnostic AI consortium

The increasing use of AI in patient diagnosis raises questions about workflow and governance. Twelve U.S. health systems have formed a Diagnostic AI Consortium with vendor Aidoc to develop shared standards for how diagnostic AI is evaluated and governed. Elad Walach, CEO and co-founder of Aidoc, spoke with Healthcare Innovation about the consortium’s goals and health systems’ urgency to address issues around capacity as well as diagnostic errors and delays. 



The consortium members include Advocate Health, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Hartford Healthcare, Houston Methodist, Mercy, Mount Sinai Health System, Northwell Health, Northwestern Medicine, Sutter Health, University of Florida Health, University Hospitals of Cleveland, and WellSpan Health.

Aidoc has been focused on developing clinical AI tools that help physicians make earlier, safer diagnoses by turning patient signals into actionable insight. The company has raised more than $500 million in venture funding.  

Aidoc said the consortium will co-design AI-enabled diagnostic workflows to prioritize the right cases, accelerate interpretation, and deliver critical results sooner to improve patient flow in real-world clinical settings in support of FDA market authorizations; measure their impact on safety, quality and speed to diagnosis across member sites; and turn what works into shared implementation and governance practices any health system can adopt, inside the consortium or beyond it.

Healthcare Innovation: What are some of the goals of creating this consortium?

Walach: A lot of this is about how we move quickly, but also responsibly. The plan is to build something that is not just focused on standards or discussions, but on iterative deployment. The idea is to move quickly, learn, iterate, move again, and the idea would be to go through very rapid cycles of iteration. 

HCI: Is there value in the size of this group? Do you need the scale or the amount of data that these health systems represent to improve the quality of what you're able to do with algorithms?

Walach: It’s not about the algorithm; it’s much more about the validation and diversity of workflows. It's not really about the size. The size is a side benefit of the diversity, because what we want to recommend are workflow changes and playbooks. AI has some diagnostic capabilities, but if you want to implement that in a way that really improves physician workflow and improves patient care, how do you do that? That's really what we're aiming for. Of course, everything we do is really about augmenting physicians, not replacing them.

Read the full article at Healthcare Innovation