Big Bang Health: AI and digitization as hope for the healthcare sector
At the "Big Bang Health" festival, people from business, healthcare and politics came together to talk about the possibilities of AI and co.
Alexander Britz at the Big Bang Health Festival. Everyone is talking about AI at the moment, but what it means is often unclear.
(Image: heise online / mack)
Representatives from business and politics met at the "Big Bang Health" festival to discuss the opportunities offered by AI. Executives from the technology and healthcare sectors, including some from pharmaceutical companies, gave presentations on AI and how its targeted use can open up new areas of business.
The event was hosted by former Federal Minister of Economics Brigitte Zypries, the Medical Director of University Medicine Essen, Prof. Jochen Werner, Dean and Institute Director at the FOM University of Applied Sciences and Jens de Buhr from DUP Media GmbH.
Google, Microsoft and Co.
Of course, Google Health, Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer were also there to promote their products. "Generative AI unites everything," said Alexander Britz, part of the management team at Microsoft Germany. In addition to projects for AI-supported decision-making, Britz also presented Dragon, which is intended to take over documentation tasks for doctors – The Docplanner Group had recently published something similar.
Christian Lauterbach, head of Bayer Vital GmbH, announced plans to expand research sites for cell and gene therapy in Germany and to create a "Boston on the Spree". "Good partners" for the project are "the Charité and federal politics".
In Germany, everything has been strictly regulated so far and there is "a lot of discussion about intellectual property", while "too little data is made available" in the digitalization of the healthcare system. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach had already announced in the past that he wanted to bring pharmaceutical investments back to Germany as part of his pharmaceutical strategy. The Medical Research Act is intended to help with this. One great hope is that AI will revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry and accelerate the development of medicines in particular. There was talk of a doubling of process speed.
Above all, however, the Big Bang Health was about making the healthcare system more digital. Although AI and digitalization are not a panacea, a considerable amount of work could be reduced – up to 50 percent was mentioned. This could at least compensate somewhat for the lack of staff. Everyone involved in the healthcare system had their say: doctors, nursing staff and pharmacies, as well as patients.
Everyone agreed that the topic of AI is not new, but generative AI in its current form is. And there was already good AI and robotics more than ten years ago, but the possibilities are still being used far too little – The main reason given was strict regulations.
This is supposed to change with the AI regulation, among other things, but there is still criticism that the regulation is too strict. The Health Data Utilization Act and the EU Health Data Space are intended to help obtain data in order to train AI models.
"Karl Intelligence" instead of "Health 4.0"
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach was actually supposed to give a keynote speech on the topic of "Health 4.0" at the conference. However, as has often happened, he had to cancel at short notice due to another appointment. Instead, he took part in the "WELT" newspaper's AI summit. "During the corona period, there were often different opinions, mostly fair in exchange," he tweeted. "However, when it comes to the importance of AI for the economy and medicine, we are probably united: this is where the question of whether we remain an attractive location is decided."
The summit, at which the much-discussed data analysis company Palantir was once again represented, focused primarily on the German implementation of the AI regulation. Instead of Lauterbach's keynote speech, the Big Bang Health Festival was met with criticism of his costly policy.
(mack)