Applying AI to Health Care: Health Tech Talent Institute Aims to Tackle Workforce Gap
When you hear of staffing shortages in the medical field, they often involve nurses or home care workers. But in the age of artificial intelligence and analytics, another profession is already prompting health care institutions to cry out for more applicants.
Digital health informatics—or the use of AI and computational tools to collect and utilize data to help everyone from doctors in the emergency room, to patients at home, to students and researchers in the field—is a profession experiencing burgeoning demand.
And through a partnership with Illinois Institute of Technology alumnus Frank Nayemi-Rad (Ph.D CS ’90), a trailblazer in health analytics who has created multiple quintessential companies and technologies in the field, Illinois Tech has launched an internship program that allows graduate students to assist in developing cutting-edge tools, apps, and other products alongside industry leaders who mentor them.
“New large-language models are going to transform health care in a big way. We need to train the next generation in this world of AI,” Nayemi-Rad says. “We’re going to have doctors that will work with AI to solve problems like never before. But you need knowledge brokers—you need people that understand computer science and AI, and can also be familiar with the complexity of patient care and the complexities of legal systems and policies.”
Maryam Saleh, executive director of Illinois Tech’s Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, which hosted the interns, was impressed with the results. “In just a few short weeks, our computer science students learned complex concepts in health informatics and leveraged them to build a product that our health systems partners are interested in piloting,” Saleh says.
The Health Tech Talent Institute was created via a unique partnership between Illinois Tech and Nayemi-Rad’s current company, Leap of Faith, a digital health informatics company that both licenses and provides venture capital for new innovations in the field, including grant money for the projects that the institute’s 26 interns are currently conducting.
“We want to create a training program for the health care information worker of tomorrow and expose them to things that, even if you were hired, you may not even get exposed to within the first three to five years,” says Institute adviser John Trzesniak, who is the senior director of information technology at Leap of Faith. “We have a lot of industry partners that we’re working with, and they’re telling us they need people with those skills, not necessarily specific technologies.…And the interns are definitely meeting our expectations.”
“The Health Tech Talent Institute allows Illinois Tech to take the lead in the development of both innovative technologies, as well as the highly specialized workforce required to use them, in the growing field of digital health informatics,” adds Illinois Tech President Raj Echambadi. “What better place for this to happen than at Chicago’s leading tech university?”
The program is far from a purely academic exercise; like many programs at the Kaplan Institute, it involves live projects that are currently being prepared for the market.
Intern Shreya Padaganur (M.S. CS 3rd Year) says, “The [health informatics] field is full of many exciting developments. You address problems that directly affect health care outcomes; it’s an evergreen field. Many students, including me, are choosing to look into this.”
“I wanted to be a doctor in high school, but I ended up doing this. I feel being in this field gives me the best of both worlds,” adds intern Pranjali Deshmukh (M.S. CS ’24). “Before, predicting diagnosis with data we already have, this was unconsciously done by humans with experience. But now we’re using machine learning to transfer that experience.”
The health informatics field involves not just utilizing documented health records, but also exploring demographic data—and potentially ambient voice data—that is collected in real time during doctors’ visits to immediately help with diagnoses.
Such innovations are well-represented by the four projects currently in progress at the Health Tech Talent Institute, whose industry partners include not only Leap of Faith but major health care institutions such as Weill Cornell Medicine at Cornell University, OSF Healthcare, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.
The projects involve:
Utilizing an AI to identify patterns and medical keywords documented during emergency room visits, which the AI would then use to assist the attending physician. The project would help students understand health care terminology and coding systems and how they are used to aid clinical decisions.
Developing a large language model AI trained on healthcare data to assist medical students: a highly detailed virtual patient that students could question. This initiative teaches interns how such students interact with technology, and how to develop adaptive tools.
Developing AI personas that patients access on a mobile phone or home computer, which can track the patient’s activities and provide personalized guidance for health-related questions. The project helps students understand health care terminology and coding systems, and how to develop an AI as a companion to patients and conduit to their doctors.
Loading electronic health records into a database using a standard known as the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM), which would be used for population health research, with a focus on preserving the clinical intent of the codes. The project teaches students how health care terminology and coding systems are used in clinical research.
Program leaders stressed that all the AI decisions and conclusions in the projects would be shared with and checked by human physicians.
The internship program goes well beyond superficial instruction about data analysis and different types of health coding; it also teaches students such things as how nuances in the transfer of medical data could potentially lead to false positives, the intricacies of the United States health care system, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Intern teams provide proof of concepts every two weeks to their industry partners.
Taking that level of care in developing and applying new technologies is what could potentially make Illinois Tech a true leader in the field, institute leaders say.
“These internships help reinforce Illinois Tech’s philosophy of providing a holistic education for our students, by providing experiential learning on entrepreneurial projects that are currently under development,” says Illinois Tech Provost Kenneth T. Christensen. “To our knowledge, no other academic institution is addressing the knowledge gap in digital health informatics, which our industry partners say will only grow as health care systems advance into the digital age.”
Saurabha Bhatnagar (CS ’02)—who teaches health care technology and business operations at Harvard Medical School and who has worked for large companies and startups in the health tech industry and advised on the plans for the institute—notes that large companies “absolutely realize the need for this expertise, and they’re looking for people with a cross-disciplinary skill set.…Illinois Tech is really uniquely positioned to be a health care technology institute because of the ecosystem it has: its focus on tech, its relationship with [outside] health care institutions, and its global presence in design.”
Nayemi-Rad agrees that “the fact that [Illinois Tech] has thousands of master's degree graduates and students in computer science is unprecedented. We're leveraging this pool of knowledge to build an informatics workforce.”
Nayemi-Rad founded his first company, Intelligent Medical Systems, in the 1990s based on his academic dissertation. The company was later acquired by the pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation Glaxo Wellcome, which is now known as GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). It focused on electronic medical records and was used by GSK to normalize clinical data to measure treatment interventions during the late 1990s HIV pandemic. In 1994 he founded his second company, Intelligent Medical Objects, to support the commercialization of the electronic medical record product (HealthMatics) for GSK and to focus on a section of his dissertation centered on a medical dictionary (terminology), which is now used in 90 percent of the electronic medical record systems in English-speaking countries.
In the future, both Illinois Tech and Leap of Faith officials say they want to explore bringing not just computer science students into the program, but also students pursuing degrees in engineering, design, business, and law.
Photo: Leap of Faith founder Frank Nayemi-Rad (Ph.D CS ’90), second from left, confers with interns at the Health Tech Talent Institute at Illinois Tech.
