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Health Care Management students packed the house to listen to one of Southern California’s most renowned health care figures -- Dr. Anthony Chang, Chief Intelligence and Innovation Officer and pediatric cardiologist at Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC).

The Department of Health Care Management, in collaboration with the ��ɫ���� Health Care Administration Student Forum, hosted a special lecture and Q&A session March 12 with Dr. Chang, which was held in CPaCE Conference Room 100C. The room was filled to the brim with academically engaged students, many of whom represent the college’s student health care stars preparing to enter the workforce.   

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“At my school I was the president of the math, computer and chess clubs,” Dr. Chang said, addressing the attentive students. “I happened to have mentors who were not only fantastic surgeons and cardiologists, but also had the same passion for mathematics and clinical medicine as I did.” 

“My business cards are on the table,” Dr. Chang added. “Feel free to grab one – all my information is on there; text me on my cell phone if you want, if you have questions,” he told students.” 

Dr. Chang began relaying to students how he got started in the health care industry, specifically how he began his journey into becoming one of the nation’s top experts in artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine.

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“I was already conducting primitive AI research in the 1980s when we barely had the power of desktop computers…so I had to do clinical AI research in the ICU setting with virtually no computing power, and data had to download from the monitors in the ICU and be entered in these Excel spreadsheets by hand.” 

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Fast forward to 2014 when on “Jeopardy,” IBM’s Watson DeepQA computer made history by defeating the TV quiz show’s two foremost all-time champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. 

“That was the night that I realized AI was here and in a big way,” Dr. Chang said. 

It was around that time that Dr. Chang connected with the head of the Stanford University AI Program, where he later worked to begin developing an interface between clinical medicine, AI, and the health care industry as a whole. 

Addressing the students, Dr. Chang stated, “Those spaces are getting closer, and so now you’re a big part of narrowing that gap in the future.”

Later, students were given time to ask questions, where Dr. Chang fielded questions such as, “How much of a risk does AI pose on job opportunities?” 

While Dr. Chang is optimistic that AI won’t pose a threat of taking jobs away from human workers in most health care fields, citing that artificial intelligence has made many job tasks more efficient -- such as data entry and even how some health scans are read -- he says that AI will help address the lack of man power in some job settings such as the echo tech field, where skilled technicians are at a premium. With the technology available, an automated reading device, would likely be able to conduct an entire study of a human heart and be able to detect and diagnose a congenital heart defect, for instance, without a highly trained human technician. 

“All of the ultrasound companies are looking into that,” Dr. Chang stated.

“I think there are some things that we need to let go of because AI is available, and it doesn’t make you a smarter person if you are not using AI for those things. “I’ll give you an example… as a cardiologist, we used to carry a pair of calipers in our chest coat pocket. It always poked at your chest, but you had to measure all the intervals on the electrocardiogram -- you’ll never find a cardiologist now that has a pair of calipers. No one does that anymore because it is all electronically read; I’m glad that I don’t have to do that anymore.”

“But other things you should maintain,” continued Dr. Chang.

“What I’m afraid of with AI is people over-relying on AI – it’s called ‘automation bias,’ where people won’t even critically think about things anymore. “If there’s one takeaway, AI is only an enabling resource for human intelligence. We still need doctors and nurses to be able to think critically on their feet and handle basic situations.”

In other words, AI won’t solve the life and death situations that need to be critically responded to by health care professionals on a daily basis; however, like it or not, AI is here and here to stay. 

So, as Dr. Chang implored, students should start now to actively understand AI and its role, yet ditching the emphasis on things like rote memorization, opting for critical thinking skills and practical application. 

With that, Dr. Chang had a few additional remarks for students, ending with, “Please use me as a liaison to do a project at CHOC; we love having young people come to our hospital.” 

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