UW Health, Epic Host National Roundtable on Harnessing AI in Healthcare
UW Health, the integrated health system of the University of Wisconsin, and Epic co-hosted a Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare on June 5 in Washington, D.C.. The participants included chief information officers and chief medical information officers from many large health systems.
The meeting was hosted by Alan Kaplan, CEO, of UW Health, with Chero Goswami, Chief Information & Digital Officer of UW Health, and Seth Hain, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Epic, moderating.
Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) outlined several key Health and Human Services initiatives, such as ongoing AI activities at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.
The goal was to identify strategies necessary to help policymakers shape effective laws and regulations in support of effective AI implementations in healthcare.
“Through augmenting clinical care and automating some administrative tasks, AI has the potential to improve access to care and enhance the patient and provider experience, supporting the health care workforce, not replacing it,” Goswami said in a statement. “With persistent healthcare workforce shortages, we need tools like AI to assist with the administrative burden that too often falls on those caring for our patients.”
“Part of making AI available to everyone includes rolling it out in an equitable way for patients and care teams, ensuring organizations can evaluate and monitor it in the context of their patients and workflows,” said Epic’s Hain in a statement.
A report on the roundtable meeting identified key themes that emerged during the discussions.
Participants agreed that AI can augment clinical and administrative roles, enhance efficiency, and allow organizations to strengthen the “face-to-face” human interactions necessary for high quality care while integrating new technologies. They emphasized the need for strategic AI adoption, focusing on outcomes rather than outputs, and discussed specific AI use cases such as real-time patient monitoring and automated data entry.
Participants also explored how AI can enhance access to care, expedite healthcare delivery, and address disparities in underserved communities while reflecting on potential pitfalls that must be addressed in regulating this transformative technology. The roundtable included discussions on responsible AI adoption, understanding AI's limitations, infrastructure investment, and addressing the healthcare industry’s burnout crisis.
The health leaders participating agreed on many areas where regulatory support is needed. They said that new and updated regulations should:
• Encourage AI innovation and ensure access to AI-driven tools regardless of location. Open-source tools and best practices should be available, especially in low-resource settings.
• Ensure AI is used to empower patients, improve public health, and transform care delivery rather than reinforce existing processes.
• Help shape the development of AI tools that ensure equitable access and address disparities in quality of care, particularly for rural and underserved communities.
• Foster local validation of AI models. Participants agreed that the contextual and regional
variations in AI model outcomes necessitate local validation to ensure equitable and accurate
output tailored to specific patient populations and healthcare workflows. This validation is
especially critical for widespread adoption outside of major metropolitan areas and top clinical
centers.
• Extend beyond the patient-provider relationship to encompass all interactions involving patient data, recognizing that any data within a medical setting has clinical implications. As healthcare expands beyond traditional settings into at-home care, telehealth, and community-based organizations, regulatory frameworks must adapt.
• Provide targeted investment and support to ensure AI benefits reach rural and under-resourced settings, such as federal incentives to encourage broader adoption of AI technologies.
Establishing registries for AI tools can facilitate tracking and validation across different settings, while open-source tools can promote innovation and local validation, ensuring equitable access to AI benefits, the report said.
Roundtable participants stressed the importance of balancing AI's benefits with ethical
considerations, patient engagement, and robust regulatory frameworks. Collaboration among
stakeholders—industry, government, and patients—will be essential in many areas. For instance, they suggested structuring a public health approach to AI to ensure its benefits are available in rural and low-resource settings. The industry must address disparities in AI investment due to existing payment structures and embrace flexible governance frameworks that incorporate diverse stakeholder perspectives.
