hEALTH EQUITY INNOVATION WITH AI
Lee Sanders, MD, Chief of General Pediatrics at Stanford
Balancing Potential with Caution
As a general pediatrician and professor of pediatrics and health policy at Stanford University, Dr. Lee Sanders actively explores the intersections of healthcare, technology, and equity. He dedicates his career to preventive health, behavioral health, and chronic disease management, with a special emphasis on addressing literacy and language disparities in healthcare.
Dr. Sanders highlights the critical juncture humanity is approaching due to advancements in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) and gene editing. Inspired by historian Yuval Harari, Dr. Sanders views this era as a pivotal moment in human history. For the first time, we are surpassing previously unimagined limits in both intellectual and physical capabilities. These leaps in knowledge and potential, facilitated by AI and genetic technologies, have significant implications for human health—not only within startups and health systems but also impacting the core of human health.
To improve human health, we not only need smarter health systems but also smarter, more connected and healthier communities.
AI Can Enable Meaningful Improvements in Human Health
Dr. Sanders expresses both excitement and caution, acknowledging that these are perilous times for health due to the rapid pace of technological progress. Funded by the National Institutes of Health and other sources, his research particularly focuses on how AI can improve health- and community-based systems of care by enhancing human capabilities in preventive health, chronic disease management, and clinical research.
In preventive health, for example, Dr. Sanders highlights a recent randomized controlled trial aimed at reducing childhood obesity, in which low-income parents worked with healers and technologists to co-design an AI tool that tailors behavioral coaching to parent preferences. The result was both reduced child obesity and reduced health inequities. In the realm of chronic disease management, AI-driven care coordination platforms are being developed to address individual needs that often extend beyond medical issues, thereby facilitating easier navigation of health systems for patients and their families.
Moreover, Dr. Sanders is advancing basic and translational research through AI. Leveraging computer vision and audio algorithms, and employing a cross-disciplinary approach, his team is developing and testing new applications of AI to study human behavior in healthcare settings. One focus is to create open-source algorithms to automatically code dyadic communication—such as doctor-patient communications and parent-child interactions—for key features, such as pose estimation, gaze, and conversational turns. Compared to the current gold standard of laborious human coding, the new algorithms could accelerate the pace of neurocognitive research by more than a thousandfold. This will not only enable neuroscientists to explore new research questions in behavioral health but also diversify study populations. The resulting models hold the promise of advancing algorithmic fairness, providing new insights for the global community. For experimental research, these tools are designed to offer real-time feedback loops that may soon help humans treat each other better—in hospital rooms, exam rooms, classrooms, and living rooms.
Can AI Ensure That Human-Health Advances Reach Everyone in Need?
With the acceleration of AI, there is also an extraordinary opportunity to address systemic inequities for those in high-risk and under-resourced communities. Addressing a question about the broader implications of AI in healthcare, Dr. Sanders notes the potential to transform healthcare systems from being primarily reactive—focused on managing and treating diseases—to being proactive in disease prevention and management. He stresses that AI and other new technologies are intended to augment human efforts, not replace them, enabling healthcare providers to better serve their patients.
Dr. Sanders also underscores the importance of responsible innovation and equitable access to these emerging technologies. He emphasizes the moral and economic imperative to engage people from vulnerable communities as co-designers of each AI health solution. This approach is not only a good strategy for business models (innovation, quality, and market share), but also a necessary strategy for human health.
History teaches us that disparities are caused not just by any new technology, but mainly by the most efficacious technology. AI provides us the first opportunity in human history to reverse this historical axiom. We can actually cure health disparities with AI. All it requires is the moral clarity and leadership of each AI leader (founder, CEO, CTO) to insist on the moral imperative. One proven and profitable approach to this moral imperative is for each design team to hire and train people from the local communities at greatest risk of the negative health outcomes you are trying to prevent.
In conclusion, Dr. Sanders calls for a balanced approach to embracing technological innovations in healthcare, fostering collaboration, and promoting inclusivity to drive positive outcomes. As we venture into this new age of medicine, his insights remind us of the dual potential of technology to transform and challenge the healthcare landscape, urging a cautious yet optimistic path forward.
