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Can Generative AI transform healthcare?Can Generative AI transform healthcare?
Healthcare industry need to learn to harness the promise of AI without repeating the mistakes of past digital health revolutions. Here's why.
3 Min Read
Healthcare experts at WHX Tech-EHS Summit in DubaiWHX Tech
Generative AI may be the fastest-adopted technology in history, but in healthcare it is still largely seen through the narrow lens of chatbots. That perception, argued experts at WHX Tech-EHS Summit in Dubai during a panel discussion, risks blinding policymakers and providers to its deeper potential, and to the barriers that stand in its way.
“It’s like saying the internet is only e-mail,” said Christian Hein, former Novartis vice-president for digital transformation. “Chatbots are just the front-end. The real power lies in what sits beneath, which is an information engine capable of synthesising scientific literature, drafting clinical trial protocols, automating reimbursement coding and extracting unstructured data from medical records.”
The discussion, moderated by health AI consultant Sigrid Berge van Rooijen, opened with a question: Is generative AI destined to remain a glorified customer-service tool?
For Tatyana Kanzaveli, founder of Open Health Network, the danger lies in merely bolting new technologies onto outdated systems. “We cannot just deploy GenAI to augment old business processes,” she said. “Imagine agentive AI predicting when MRI equipment is about to fail, ordering the part, scheduling the engineer and coordinating the fix automatically. Or a digital twin monitoring your health data, arranging prescriptions, transport and care without you lifting a finger. That is the world we should be building.”
Bharat Gera, who has spent 25 years working on digital health transformation, echoed the need for caution but also saw promise in simple tools such as summarisation. “Doctors spend huge amounts of time reading patient histories. Summarisation is a powerful use case, here and now,” he said. But he warned against overloading clinicians with alarms and unvalidated signals: “Healthcare is fundamentally human. If we forget that, technology will make things worse.”
Regulation, risk and responsibility
If technology is racing ahead, regulation is struggling to keep pace. Amil Khanzada, CEO of Virufy, highlighted how laws differ dramatically across jurisdictions. “In Dubai, anonymised medical data cannot be sent overseas. In Pakistan, there isn’t even a privacy law yet. Patients have the right to delete their data, but what happens once that data has already trained a model? Do you retrain it from scratch?”
Consent forms, he added, are another minefield. “You can try to use generative AI to summarise them, but you still need human validation. And patients often sign without reading. The legal and ethical risks are enormous.”
Kanzaveli pointed to the dangers of misplaced trust. “Generative AI is persuasive. You trust it. But in healthcare, a wrong answer can mean a missed diagnosis, or worse. We spent longer building the risk-management framework for a virtual psychologist than we did building the engine itself. That is our responsibility.”
The human factor
Perhaps the most sobering intervention came from Anne Forsyth, Vice-Chair of Digital Health Canada and IT lead at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital. She recounted how a cancer diagnosis was delayed for a year because test results were stuck in a hospital IT interface. “What do you tell the patient? Tech will never be perfect. We must always plan for failure,” she said. “If you are building GenAI tools for hospitals, think about what happens when they fail, and what supports clinicians will have.”
Hein agreed. “Technology is easy. Change is the hard part. The real work is persuading people that you are there to augment, not replace them. Without that, AI will never scale.”
A future too important to ignore
Despite their differing emphases, the panellists agreed that generative AI is already reshaping healthcare and that ignoring it is not an option. “There is no industry that can remain competitive without deploying these technologies,” Kanzaveli said. “The only question is how responsibly we do it.”
As Berge van Rooijen concluded, the challenge is not whether generative AI is more than a chatbot. It clearly is. The question is how to harness its promise without repeating the mistakes of past digital health revolutions, and without losing sight of the people at the heart of the system.
