Parkland Health in Dallas was named one of five beneficiaries of a nationwide initiative to better wield artificial intelligence tech and machine learning in healthcare diagnostics.
Kaiser Permanente, a California-based healthcare provider for nearly 13 million Americans, announced on Monday that it had selected five grant recipients for its Augmented Intelligence in Medicine and Healthcare Initiative (AIM-HI). Parkland Health’s Dr. Cesar Termulo Jr., a pediatric specialist, was awarded a three-year grant of up to $750,000 to deploy these technologies in real-life demonstrations to aid young asthma patients.
According to Kaiser Permanente, AIM-HI fielded over 120 applications for this funding opportunity.
“Ultimately, we selected a balanced portfolio that addresses real-world challenges across diverse technologies, health care settings, and patient groups,” explained AIM-HI’s principal investigator Dr. Vincent Liu, according to a news release.
Several studies have already been conducted on how AI and machine learning might benefit pediatric asthma, from expediting diagnosis to assisting in its management, such as by predicting attacks ahead of time.
Asthma, a chronic illness in which a person might experience difficulty breathing due to inflammation of the airway, is the third most prevalent cause of children under age 15 being hospitalized, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Obesity, which is a significant public health problem in the U.S., tends to exacerbate not only the risk of developing asthma as an adult but also the symptoms. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 42.3% of Texans are obese and have asthma.
The symptoms of asthma, such as chest tightness, coughing, and wheezing, are typically managed through corticosteroids and bronchodilator inhalers, but some cases are quite severe and difficult to control. In these cases, research suggests that AI tools could develop algorithms to improve medical interventions. Yet, the deployment of such tools has been slow to roll out.
AIM-HI aims to remedy this through the grant initiative, with real-life deployments expected to go towards projects at Dallas’ Parkland Health, Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Atlanta’s Emory University, San Diego’s San Ysidro Health, and Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“All five [grant recipients] hold promise to improve medicine’s capability to bring these cutting-edge technologies to responsibly improve patient outcomes,” said Dr. Stephen M. Parodi, executive vice president of the Permanente Federation and the Permanente Medical Group.
