2019 EDITION

Transforming Healthcare with Artificial Intelligence

October 15, 2019 - 11:00 - 12:30

Nordia Room

It is becoming obvious that only by fundamentally rethinking our healthcare systems, we can successfully address the serious challenges we are facing globally. Perhaps the most significant challenge is the ageing population, which comes with a high percentage of chronically ill people, often with multiple conditions. In addition, there is a rising incidence of preventable lifestyle related diseases caused by risk factors such as obesity, smoking, and alcohol. Chronic diseases in EU already today result in the loss of 3.4 million potential productive life years, which amounts to an annual loss of €115 billion for the EU economy. At the same time, there is a shortage of qualified healthcare professionals, and growing quality and efficiency issues. Finally, public spending on healthcare is steadily rising. The EU spends around 10% of its GDP on healthcare. In 2015, US healthcare spending increased 5.8 percent to $3.2 trillion. These costs are expected to continue to rise.

We need to transition to new care delivery models, to address the quadruple aim:

improve the health of a population
reduce the per capita cost of healthcare
improve the patient experience including quality and satisfaction and
improve the work life of healthcare providers by providing necessary support.

The good news is that digital technologies now possess a power, affordability, and pervasiveness, that they have the potential to enable us to achieve these goals. Of course, technology by itself will not be the answer, in the end healthcare and healthy living is all about people. Meaningful innovation will happen if technology is used to augment professionals and to empower consumers and patients, while also meeting the diverse goals of the various organizations involved in a healthcare ecosystem.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of key enablers of the digital transformation in healthcare. The connected medical devices will be everywhere, from hospital to home, providing a rich variety of health and context specific data. AI will be instrumental to turn this data into actionable insights across the continuum of care.
In this session several speakers will address this potential from the perspectives of industry, research and the European Commission.

MORE INFORMATION

CHAIR

Milan Petkovic (Philips)

AI for Health – Quo Vadis?

Mark van Gils (Research Professor, VTT)

EU actions to support AI in Health and Care

Marco Marsella (Head of “eHealth, Well-being, and Ageing” Unit in the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, DG CONNECT, European Commission)