Gaining Trust and Confidence in AI and Automation with Dr. Mohamed Alarakhia, Managing Director of the eHealth Centre of Excellence

Healthcare Change Makers

For this special edition of Healthcare Change Makers, HIROC is partnering with the Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario (AFHTO) to bring you the voices of health leaders on the cutting edge of advancing emergent technologies in clinical practices.

In today’s episode, we speak with Dr. Mohamed Alarakhia about artificial intelligence (AI), automation in primary care, and what the future of healthcare could look like.

Dr. Alarakhia is a family physician at The Centre for Family Medicine Family Health Team in Waterloo Ontario, a Faculty Digital Health Lead at McMaster University’s Michael G DeGroote School of Medicine, and the Managing Director of the eHealth Centre of Excellence.

When he’s not teaching or caring for patients, Dr. Alarakhia is focused on seizing every opportunity to make clinicians’ work easier by leveraging critical data and equipping clinicians with tools that automate day-to-day processes, such as his robot Bernie.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic inspired many to try innovative technology solutions to assist in rapidly-evolving care conditions, Dr. Alarakhia wants to ensure healthcare staff are better informed of the associated risks and opportunities with evidence-based studies.

At the 2021 AFHTO conference, Dr. Alarakhia presented a session on “Artificial Intelligence and Robots in Primary Care” alongside Dr. Ervin Sejdić. We encourage you to listen to Dr. Sejdić’s episode of the podcast after this one to get a full understanding and appreciation of the critical work done by these experts.

Quotables:

“I think it’s important for us to make sure that what we do is explainable. There’s something called ‘Explainable AI,’ which really allows a clinician to understand what’s behind the hood. Why is the AI or automation doing what it’s doing? And I think that’s really key for us to gain trust and confidence.” – MA

“Clinicians value evidence. They want to know why they’re doing something, what the benefits are or lack thereof. So, when we go to talk to clinicians about different technologies like automation, artificial intelligence, we go with evidence about what it has done, where the gaps are, and just be very open about that.” – MA

“One can be more effective if they’ve got their personal life in order, know when to start and stop doing things, and done self-care. A lot of leaders have been going full tilt for so long during the pandemic and they’re struggling. So, I think it’s important to have that balance.” – MA

“I feel that we have a great system, but we can do more. We have an opportunity to do more and make it easier, so people don’t fall through the cracks.” – MA

“We’re at the cusp of doing something quite different right now. I’ve thought for a while that we have a capability to leverage tools that we’re using every day a lot better.” – MA

“Just like any intervention in medicine, we need to have a particular amount of evidence around it. We need to have rationale for using it, and we need to demonstrate that it works in a real-life context.” – MA

“It’s not about ‘this is the greatest thing and why aren’t you implementing it?’ It’s about here’s another tool in your toolbox that you can use to help yourself and patients.” – MA

Mentioned in this Episode:

Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario (AFHTO)

The Centre for Family Medicine Family Health Team

McMaster University’s Michael G DeGroote School of Medicine

eHealth Centre of Excellence

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