
Stanford CS 522: AI in Healthcare Seminar, Andrew Ng Notes - casawa
http://cs522.stanford.edu
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fny
We need a major policy transformation before any of this gains traction.

Health systems, unless they're also an insurance provider, have no incentive
whatsoever to use make sure you're healthy. For as long as we live in a fee-
for-service world, the system doesn't care if you get sick repeatedly for as
long as you have to pay.

Want to start a successful health IT company? Optimize billing, minimize some
penalty from Medicare and Medicate, or identify some population that needs
services that can be charged for. Almost no one on the business side of
medicine gives a damn to prevention and early-stage disease detection, since
it will heavily cut into their bottom line.

Frankly, we don't even need AI to make a lot of progress in this space. There
are a lot of simple regression models for preventative care that we could use
today to make a decent step forward, but no one cares to implement them in
part because implementing the money costs some money and in the end hurts the
hospitals bottom line. The only projects with traction are the ones where some
federal penalty or reward at stake (e.g. readmissions, sepsis, Obamacare's
Accountable Care Organizations.)

I've even seen the head of a surgery department mock a startup pitch with the
following: "you realize we make money from those operations you're trying to
prevent?"

Frankly, someone needs to start a new hospital system to compete with the
entrenched providers, because I doubt incentives for existing providers will
change for a looong time. A Kaiser or "health membership" model would seem to
be the best fit.

Source: 4 years working in Health IT with a stint in VC.

