With half of the world’s population lacking access to healthcare services, and 30% of the adult population in the US having inadequate health insurance coverage to get even basic access to services, it should have been clear that a pandemic like COVID-19 would strain the global healthcare system way over its maximum capacity. In this context, many are trying to embrace and encourage the use of telehealth as a way to provide safe and convenient access to care. However, telehealth in itself can not scale to cover all our needs unless we improve scalability and efficiency through AI and automation.
In this talk, we will describe how our work on combining latest AI advances with medical experts and online access has the potential to change the landscape in healthcare access and provide 24/7 quality healthcare. Combining areas such as NLP, vision, and automatic diagnosis we can augment and scale doctors. We will describe our work on combining expert systems with deep learning to build state-of-the-art medical diagnostic models that are also able to model the unknowns. We will also show our work on using language models for medical Q&A . More importantly, we will describe how those approaches have been used to address the urgent and immediate needs of the current pandemic.