By Jan De Backer

Recently, I had the opportunity to be interviewed on the Device Talks podcast by experienced MedTech podcasters Tom Salemi and Chris Newmarker. During the interview, we covered a range of topics, including the significant opportunities that digital health and medical technology companies face in the era of AI. We also delved into the considerable challenges present in healthcare and discussed the necessity for innovative, out-of-the-box thinking.

We talked about how we might be placing overly high expectations on physicians nowadays. It’s not just their medical expertise that’s anticipated, but also their proficiency in evaluating new technologies. Unfortunately, their primary workplaces, which are often large hospital networks or insurance companies, don’t usually offer much support in this area. The rigid silos within current hospital systems creates significant obstacles, particularly for multi-modal applications, such as AI tools developed using structured data from pulmonary function testing, exercise tolerance testing, and imaging.

The lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI is expected to have a chilling effect on the availability of healthcare data for training AI models. As a result, we anticipate a major debate over the next three to five years concerning healthcare AI and the types of data permissible for model training. In this context, maintaining complete control over both the generation of data and the development of AI applications is likely to be key for successful deployment. This approach is the foundation of our work at Fluidda and Medimprove.

In our discussion about respiratory medicine, we emphasized the necessity to revive and enhance tests such as cardio-pulmonary exercise testing (CPET) and pulmonary rehabilitation.

Our objective should be to establish high-tech environments where the required technology is readily available, rather than expecting clinicians to evaluate, purchase, and implement a wide array of technologies. Such environments will be appealing to driven, patient-centric healthcare professionals. This synergy is set to lead to unprecedented improvements in clinical outcomes and reductions in cost.

The full interview can be found here: