AI in health care creates unique data challenges

"The health care industry produces an enormous amount of data. An IDC study estimates the volume of health data created annually, which hit over 2,000 exabytes in 2020, will continue to grow at a 48% rate year over year. Accelerated by the passage of the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which mandated that health care practitioners adopt electronic records, there’s now a wealth of digital information about patients, practices, and procedures where before there was none.
The trend has enabled significant advances in AI and machine learning, which rely on large datasets to make predictions ranging from hospital bed capacity to the presence of malignant tumors in MRIs. But unlike other domains to which AI has been applied, the sensitivity and scale of health care data makes collecting and leveraging it a formidable challenge. Tellingly, although 91% of respondents to a recent KPMG survey predicted that AI could increase patient access to care, 75% believe AI could threaten patient data privacy. Moreover, a growing number of academics point to imbalances in health data that could exacerbate existing inequalities..." Lire la suite