Can AI Truly Transform Health Care?: A Recent IEEE Pulse on Stage Forum Offers Some Perspective

As scholars have predicted and researchers have now shown, we are entering an age of global artificial intelligence (AI) convergence. Health care is just one area in which AI is gaining a foothold, as evidenced by two parallel conferences held in March 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first of these was the annual meeting of the Hospital Information and Management Systems Society, attended by nearly 45,000 participants; the second was a more focused, engineering-oriented conference on biomedical health informatics and biosensor networks, attended by about 450. Straddling those two meetings, IEEE Pulse held its second IEEE Pulse on Stage event, focusing (not surprisingly) on the use of AI in health care (Figure 1).