October 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Technology is increasing the ability to better monitor and forecast infectious disease outbreaks as researchers are testing advanced analytics in different capacities to learn more about an infectious disease going forward. That includes the potential born from artificial intelligence. One of the challenges that researchers are finding currently with artificial intelligence, though, is that there needs to be a very big body of data to actually use it at scale.
“The challenge with an outbreak is that in its early stages, you have relatively few data,” said Dr. George. “There’s a mismatch of applying a lot of artificial intelligence capabilities to an emerging outbreak. We need to find tools that will help us work in a data sparse environment. That’s one of the challenges that we’re working on and trying to apply the advances in artificial intelligence and other advanced analytics to this particular problem.”