Lake Nona Regional Chamber presents new AI healthcare projects and technology | Charge Latino

On Friday the Lake Nona Regional Chamber hosted the State of Medical City event, a symposium where healthcare experts discussed artificial intelligence in modern healthcare technology.

The event focused on the new healthcare projects and technologies being introduced in Lake Nona Medical City and at the UCF Lake Nona Hospital. These include improvements in using data to make decisions, voice technology for patient and medical staff interactions, engaging tools for patient education, and a program that allows patients to receive care at home.

The keynote speakers also stressed the need for responsible and ethical use of Al in healthcare, along with teamwork and partnerships that are fostering innovation in the health community. 

UCF Lake Nona Hospital partnered with data scientists from HCA Florida Healthcare, which is a network of hospitals and medical centers, Google and other technology experts to create Al technology with clinical accurate data to accelerate their patient care.

“As we all know, UCF is the secret sauce of Medical City,” Dr. Deborah German, vice president for health affairs and dean of UCF College of Medicine, said. “We were the very first thing to come here, and you can’t build a Medical City without an anchor tenant, and the anchor tenant is the UCF College of Medicine.”

Wendy Brandon, CEO of UCF Lake Nona Hospital, announced the development of an innovative artificial intelligence tool aimed at enhancing patient care.

“We developed it here and we have it with other HCA hospitals who are now testing it in their environments,” Brandon said.

Brandon said UCF Lake Nona Hospital is the first innovation hub for its parent company, HCA Healthcare, which operates over 180 hospitals nationwide and in the UK. She said UCF Lake Nona hospital is dedicated to testing new technologies to enhance patient care and provide its technology to other hospitals.

“As an innovation hub, we are tasked with testing new technology,” Brandon said. “Some that were designed for healthcare and we are trying to see what’s best for our clients.”

Sara Liao-Troth, AVP Data Science at HCA Healthcare, said they are doing that at Lake Nona, where innovative systems are being piloted to automatically capture and process patient conversations, translating spoken words while also capturing their semantic meaning. She said this technology ensures that relevant healthcare information is logged in real time, enhancing communication and providing the enhancing care team access to vital patient information when needed.

“It’s giving time back to the care team so that they can interact and connect with their patient in a deeper way,” Brandon said.

Brandon said they are using the Al tool with their patients and continue to refine it.

“The information that is captured by the application is HIPAA compliant, very safe,” Brandon said. “That was our highest priority that we protected our patients’ data.”

Brandon said UCF Lake Nona Hospital has recently enhanced its Al technology, allowing physicians to use a tool similar to an iPhone. She said they previously relied on Google Glass to capture information in patient rooms, but now doctors can easily keep the device in their pocket to gather data more efficiently.

“The next phase will be to roll it out to more hospitals as the tool is becoming more refined and has more capabilities,” Brandon said.

Greg Corlis, emerging technologies leader and principal at KPMG, said that with new advanced technology their aim is to track patient locations on the property to enhance care efficiency. He said this initiative introduces the concept of dynamic scheduling.

Corlis said if a patient is scheduled for an appointment but is still about half an hour away, the HCA or Nemours app on their phone will indicate that they have not yet arrived on site. 

“So I can look who is on premise and reschedule them and actually get them in with the provider ahead of time as well,” Corlis said. “That’s all based on data and Al.”

Liao-Troth said they are now working to expand this capability into a comprehensive care environment. She said the facility plans to incorporate new multimodal aspects of computer vision to monitor patient activity without the presence of medical staff.

“How do you take all of the sensor data that’s available through all of our facilities to be able to weave that together into literally a space at care, a space that can actually monitor, detect, predict and really, I think, outwardly provide a level of care to our patients that is 24/7 without necessarily a nurse or a doctor standing right there,” Liao-Troth said.

Brian Itzel, president of Orlando Health and president of Orlando Health St. Cloud Hospital, said Orlando Health has launched a new initiative called Hospital Care at Home, allowing clinically appropriate patients who qualify for this program to receive hospital-level care in their homes.

“Nurses will come and visit you three times a day, you will have telecapabilities with specialists that need to see you, and you will be visited and remotely monitored,” Itzel said.

Corlis said the advancements in immersive technologies are also emerging, aimed at informing patients about conditions like diabetes and medical procedures. He said they are working with Nemours Children Hospital in some prototypes with HCA to educate patients.

“In Al, Generative Al, I can change language in a heartbeat,” Corlis said. “So, I can change it to any language that’s relevant for those individuals, so I think as we see the emergence of that technology, it’s going to reduce patient anxiety and actually create a better environment.”

German said that UCF President Alexander N. Cartwright has a fantastic plan for UCF to become a premier engineering and technology university.

“Now that might sound like it doesn’t include anything but engineering,” German said. “But it does, and if you think about healthcare and the future of healthcare, it’s going to incorporate technology, engineering and artificial intelligence and all of those things.”

German said that their research uses engineering and technology.

“These are two truths, as a tool, so for example, in Biomedical Engineering, you study cells, but you are using engineering tools as well,” German said. “We have to bring the engineers and physicians-scientists together to explore and create the new cures and the new devices that will be used.”

German said that there are two new areas of interest in the College of Medicine– aerospace medicine and an infectious disease and pathogen surveillance program.

Among the new programs, UCF has strong cancer, cardiac, neuroscience and population health research going on as well, German said.

“Students at UCF have the remarkable opportunity to engage in research in so many different areas and we welcome the students,” German said.

German said that UCF now has an Academic Health Sciences Center, which includes the Medical school, College of Health Professions, Biomedical Sciences, Hospitals, Clinics, Residency, Fellowship Training Programs, Centers, Institutes, and the addition of a new Nurse building to their program this fall.

Joshua Valan, a first-year medical student at UCF, recognizes the potential of AI in education and healthcare but warns of its limitations.

“Artificial intelligence can be used for good, but it depends on how you use it,” Valan said.

Valan said people should understand the importance of having foundational knowledge before relying on Al tools like ChatGPT because Al depends on how much data it has available.

“If you don’t know your background research, the chance of you getting something wrong, and then propagating that knowledge into your own personal knowledge, it’s very high,” Valan said.

Alejandra Duque, a second-year medical student at UCF, embraces Al but voices concerns over its impact on healthcare careers. She said she has found significant value in using artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT in her studies.

“I like it a lot, I use ChatGPT; that’s like one of the biggest things that we use in our classes,” Duque said.

Duque said she would like Al used for safer work environments and that the hospitals are already doing it with electronic records.

“It’ll flag potential medications that the patients are on that have contradictions, so things like that could make our lives easier,” Duque said. “It’s already happening, but I would like to see it develop even further.”

Samantha Lombardi, operations manager for care transformation and innovation at UCF Lake Nona Hospital, said that healthcare professionals are tasked with the responsibility of caring for their patients, communities, and loved ones, but HCA’s approach to responsible Al goes beyond a responsibility to include ethics.

“We are leveraging our experts, our physicians, our nurses, our therapists, our social workers to help us build and develop this technology,” Lombardi said. “The second is that human loop, so what you saw in that video with the nurse handoff, all of the tools that we’re building are not to be a decision maker for our clinician, but they’re meant to enable decisions for our patients.” 

A previous version of this article included the wrong place of employment for Samantha Lombardi. It has been updated to reflect the correct place of employment.