“Pharmaceutical organizations that have treatments for rare diseases on the market look to digital technology and AI for help in reaching those patients because they believe there are more patients out there who are either under or misdiagnosed,” said Coulter. “But rare disease experts point out that many people don’t want to be diagnosed because of the stigma associated with some diseases. It is a striking revelation that people don’t think about and that shows the power of unintended consequences.”
The panel wrapped with discussions about other areas of digital health that people should be paying attention to, including providing accurate medical information online from trusted health providers, remote patient monitoring and care, precise personalized medicine, and predicting what supplies need to be ordered before anyone realizes they’re needed.
Outside of the panel discussion, Halfin and Fowkes shared more about why their companies, LabCorp and IBM, respectively, decided to sponsor the summit and send them to participate.
IBM wants to help companies like LabCorp build the platforms that will make their data more useful. But they need help from research institutions like Duke to help find new and creative use cases and, eventually, solutions.
LabCorp, on the other side of the equation, is in a unique position where they have an enormous dataset since they run about half of all medical diagnostics ordered across the country. But that data is far more valuable when it is correlated to clinical and genomic data. They’re looking to partners such as Duke to grow ideas and projects into solutions to bring more value to what they think of data as a product.
“LabCorp is navigating the waters of what AI means, and since we’re facing so many opportunities, figuring out if we should build tech, buy tech or partner with someone to develop products that bring more value to our data,” Halfin said. “Partnerships with academic institutions help bring cutting-edge AI solutions to the corporate world while ensuring technologies remain current with the evolving market’s needs.”
“I travel to a number of regional events and weigh in to help people understand what typically works and what doesn’t,” Fowkes said. “And after having a number of conversations with the extended Duke team, this event seems like a layup. Successful adoption/deployment of any AI use case requires proper governance from idea through deployment. The Duke governance program already in place here is far ahead of most others, so collaborations can go faster into action.”