How board members should think about AI

Amy Baxter | | Health Exec | Economics

With AI being a buzzword in healthcare, board members of organizations need to know how best to consider the technology. Fortunately, the technology may actually make their job easier, according to Douglas Merrill, who penned an article for Harvard Business Review on what boards should know about AI.

Here are the four guidelines outlined by Merrill, CEO and founder of financial services technology company ZestFinance, for board members to orient themselves as they begin the dive into AI:

Don’t be intimidated. Board members don’t have to have an engineering degree to understand how AI and machine learning can be helpful for their healthcare organization.

Keep it simple. “The best-run AI projects should be explainable in plain English,” Merrill wrote, noting that if a vendor or internal team can’t explain how a program works and what impact it will have, it’s probably not a good fit.

Don’t be creepy. Privacy concerns have taken on new importance in the last few years, but AI projects don’t have to pull every single piece of data about a patient in order to be successful.

Think in operations, not capital investment. A top-down approach to AI should not include a one-time investment. AI has the potential to be part of overall operations instead.

See the full post below:

What Boards Need to Know About AI

Amy Baxter
Amy Baxter

Amy joined TriMed Media as a Senior Writer for HealthExec after covering home care for three years. When not writing about all things healthcare, she fulfills her lifelong dream of becoming a pirate by sailing in regattas and enjoying rum. Fun fact: she sailed 333 miles across Lake Michigan in the Chicago Yacht Club "Race to Mackinac."

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