Doctor-turned-CEO is on the front lines of AI and health

How AI is turning health records into actionable data

What you probably already know: Generative artificial intelligence is the topic of many discussions across a wide array of industries, but for health care and biotechnology, the new tech could open up opportunities that seemed all but impossible only a few years ago. One area where companies are increasingly seeing opportunities is with the information captured by physicians when they’re meeting with patients. For Yin Ho, that’s exactly what captured her interest.

Why? Ho is a doctor with an MBA — a rare combination — and had joined the board of a biotech company called Veradigm in February 2023. Only 10 short months later, she found herself as interim CEO of the publicly traded company, which does electronic health records for physicians, and analytics technology for payers and life sciences companies. She quickly saw the opportunity in AI, especially as she realized the scope of Veradigm’s unstructured data. "AI is just a tool,” Ho said. “It can help us build better tools that will allow us to improve the quality of the data.”

What it means: That can be transformational if you can take millions of health records and analyze them instantly. So Ho did something few interim CEOs do: She acquired a company. ScienceIO is a leading AI platform for health care companies that has trained its models on health care data to improve their accuracy in that space. Veradigm acquired ScienceIO in February and the combined company is now working on large language models to parse data from 200 million patients and 400,000 providers.

What happens now? Because they control the data going into the models, Ho has confidence that the AI systems will perform better than systems that are just scraping the web. She sees this as the future of electronic health records, systems that weren’t well-designed out of the gate, but that could end up being transformational in the way we treat patients. “It seemed very clear to me that was where the market was going,” she said. She has since left Veradigm and handed things off to the permanent CEO, but is excited about the future of AI in health care. “We have a really powerful technology,” Ho said, “and an awesome responsibility to use it wisely.”