this would be a really good application of AI in healthcare, but it needs to be considered in light of other predictive tools. a sr exec at a large health syst

this would be a really good application of AI in healthcare, but it needs to be considered in light of other predictive tools. a sr exec at a large health system said earlier this year that they evaluated a ton of AI tools for predicting death to inform end of life care, but none did materially better than simply asking physicians which of their patients they thought would die in 12-18 months. this AI may be better than the ones this exec studied of course even if AI performs better, it would need to offer improvements significant enough to justify the cost of implementing it, which depending on what data it uses could be non-trivial another unfortunate issue is that patient preference is only one consideration in determining how end of life care is managed. profitability is another concern. the same exec said that the health system only agreed to implement their improved end of life plan once they realized that it would be profitable to the system