Vital Signs: Leveraging Data for Better Health Outcomes (UF Explore)

Vital Signs: Leveraging Data for Better Health Outcomes

Azra Bihorac says one of the most important collaborations for doctors and nurses in the future will be with the computer at a patient’s bedside.

Computers will become as important as stethoscopes in hospitals and clinics, says Bihorac, whose research at UF Health focuses on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies for the care of critically ill patients.

“Emerging technologies provide an enormous opportunity for physicians to be able to collect data and process it on the fly in an intelligent way,” says Bihorac, the R. Glenn Davis Chair in Clinical and Translational Medicine. “To process every clinical data value for every patient, for the human brain, that is too much. But using the capacity of AI, we can synthesize the data and come to an intelligent conclusion.”

Computers instructed by precise algorithms will unlock data now buried in electronic health records, report readings from sensors that monitor patients, and record real-time data from more traditional tools like thermometers and stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs, organizing the data onto a dashboard for everyone on a care team to see.

Technology won’t replace doctors — it’s not a competition between people and machines, Bihorac says — but it will help doctors deliver better care.

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