Accelerating Health Equity With Technology and Trust

There is no shortage of interest around large language models (LLMs) in the health care and life sciences space. Are organizations able to successfully operationalize LLMs in a cost-efficient, regulatory-compliant and ethical manner?On this episode of The Health Pulse podcast, SAS Global Medical Director Dr. Steve Kearney and host Alex Maiersperger discuss key considerations around the application of LLMs. Explore how organizations are improving data interoperability and converging across health care and life sciences – thus positively impacting patient outcomes and experiences.

Health equity is a hot topic in health care, and Dr. Pooja Mittal speaks about key success components, including the importance of trust, technology and strong relationships with communities.  Bringing health stakeholders and community members together is crucial to building trust and providing culturally relevant care that drives better health outcomes. From a young age, Dr. Mittal realized that health care is not equitable, and challenging environmental conditions cause higher disease rates. With a mission to reduce health disparities, Dr. Mittal became a physician and Chief Health Equity Officer at Health Net.  She believes technology is key to making care more equitable and supporting patients from historically disadvantaged communities, as it enables access to data to better understand needs, access to telehealth, enabling patients to receive care remotely and access to culturally sensitive technology, supporting unique needs.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but there are many benefits to a balanced diet. That’s SAS’ philosophy around embracing and extending open source as explained by life sciences leaders Mark Lambrecht and Matt Becker on this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast. To keep up with the staggering pace of change, life sciences organizations need cutting-edge analytics and the flexibility to use different programming languages. Tune in for a candid conversation about the pros and cons of open source and commercial software and the importance of the statistical computing environment (SCE) in clinical research.

Bryan Vaughn is passionate about bending the cost curve in health care. As Senior Vice President, Hospitals and Health Systems at Labcorp, he focuses on the role of diagnostics in delivering better, more affordable care. On this episode, Vaughn notes that impactful partnerships across the health care ecosystem can help drive the cost of critical diagnostics down, creating a win for all stakeholders. When it comes to analytics, he is excited to see Labcorp’s wealth of health data empowering and informing patients and their doctors today—as well as the potential for predictive analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve health outcomes in the future.

Krishna Tangirala is an expert at uncovering insights about pharmaceutical products in the real world. He is Head of Data Analytics and Director of Field Outcomes Research at Organon Pharmaceuticals. In the first part of this episode, Tangirala talks to Alex about how stakeholders use health economics and outcomes research throughout the pharmaceutical life cycle to better understand the value, potential and safety of drug products. He also discusses new and emerging applications for real-world data (RWD) in pharma, including external control arms and digital twins and the potential for technology to solve challenges around managing, analyzing and visualizing data insights from RWD. Next, Sherrine Eid, Global Lead for Real-World Evidence and Epidemiologist at SAS, joins Alex. Eid is passionate about mathematically modeling disease patterns and finding ways to intervene and improve outcomes. For her, it’s all about using the best tools at her disposal to help people live their healthiest, best lives. Eid discusses the role of RWD and connected devices to enable personalized medicine and shares her perspective on the value of personalized health information as a diabetes patient.

Dr. Iulia Vann, Public Health Director in Guildford County, NC, is passionate about public health and data-driven decision making.On this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast, Dr. Vann discusses the importance of prevention, the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, lessons learned about closing gaps in data and analytics and resiliency.Dr. Vann explains that effective public health strategies include strong relationships with local partners, communication and planning for health equity measures, like putting 40% of vaccines aside for historically marginalized communities. Data modernization is another crucial element for health organizations to serve their communities better. Requiring agencies to integrate data from different systems and ensuring the data is transparent and reliable is essential in making data-driven decisions as a public health agency. She explains how Guilford County partnered with SAS to create dashboards to monitor program performance and public health areas of focus, such as chronic diseases, cancer and environmental health, to make the best possible decisions for their community.

SAS’ Andy Bayliss works with life sciences manufacturers, applying AI and machine learning to improve their processes at scale. On this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast, he tells Alex that pharmaceutical manufacturers are experts at reliably delivering high-quality products. They must be because it’s a highly regulated industry with a patient at the end of every product.   The opportunity to utilize technology energizes Bayliss. Technology like sensors and computer vision allows continuous monitoring to spot trends and potential deviations earlier in pharmaceutical manufacturing. It’s about giving the human expert additional insight to create meaningful action.

Dr. Michel van Genderen, physician, AI leader and founder of the Datahub at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, shares his passion for ethical AI in hospitals.  Could AI be a game-changer for the health care industry? Dr. van Genderen thinks so, and explains the two biggest global health care challenges are the shortage of personnel and an increasing health care demand. He believes trustworthy AI could alleviate these pressures and solve clinical challenges faster. For example, Erasmus Medical Center developed an AI model used in the intensive care unit that decreases the administrative workload for nurses.  Using AI in a responsible, ethical and sustainable manner is crucial to its adoption in clinical settings so that health care professionals trust AI when they use it at the bedside. To develop and deploy AI models in clinical settings, a group of multidisciplinary teams comes together, including data scientists, data engineers, physicians, nurses, patients and more, which is the remit of the Datahub at Erasmus Medical Center. Adhering to ethical guidelines is crucial when teams develop models, monitor their performance and adopt them in clinical or operational settings. Dr. van Genderen is optimistic that all industries will be able to benefit from AI, as long as decisions made with analytics and AI are ethical, trustworthy, explainable and fair.

Steven Lehmann is passionate about the impact of data science in business. He is Head of Data Science and Analytics Strategy for Johnson & Johnson in EMEA. He also wrote the book Digital Jackpot on what it really takes to make data driven decisions that matter in business. Hint, the answer often isn’t more data. On this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast, he talks with Alex about the importance of telling the right story with data so that people will listen. He introduces the concept of data elasticity in finding the right balance between enough data and the speed at which you need to make business decisions in order to solve real-world problems. Data elasticity allows data scientists and business leaders to make strong recommendations with imperfect data, knowing that their recommendations would still hold within a reasonable margin of error in the data.  When it comes to the explosion of data, AI and advanced analytics, he reminds us that these are excellent tools, but the individuals and organizations who can make the best use of them to drive impact will ultimately succeed.

Dr. Meg Schaeffer, an Epidemiologist and Public Health Advisor at SAS and an elite athlete and champion for health equity, is a perfect example of what passion for public health looks like.In this episode, Dr. Schaeffer speaks about the evolution of the bird flu and explains that North America, Europe, Asia and some African countries are in the midst of the largest bird flu outbreak, with millions of birds culled. Monitoring outbreaks is crucial to predict the future of health care and to prevent a human pandemic. She also talks about health equity and the importance of combining quantitative with qualitative data to understand population needs and challenges. This helps design effective programs that reduce inequities. There is currently a lack of qualitative data, leading to resource misalignments, Schaeffer explains. Combining interviews, focus groups and text data with advanced analytics could be the key to currently overlooked insights. Despite challenges the health care industry is facing, being an elite, world-ranked triathlete has taught Dr. Schaeffer there is always a way – that temporary discomfort leads to success. She is optimistic about the future of health care with the dedication of the public health workforce and cutting-edge software, supporting decision-making processes.