Trends in Healthcare: 2023 ViVE Conference Recap

Last month, a few members of Lark’s leadership team and I attended ViVE 2023 in Nashville, Tennessee. The conference was invigorating, as always, and featured many presentations on new and innovative healthcare topics. However, there was one topic that stood out amongst the rest. It was the far reaching implications of AI and ChatGPT. From excitement to fear and everything in between, the use of ChatGPT in healthcare was so polarizing that I wanted to take a few minutes to share my thoughts. 

For a brief background on the topic, OpenAI developed and launched ChatGPT, an artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot, in November 2022. ChatGPT reached 100 million¹ users within the first two months and has since released an updated version called GPT-4, as well as, a pay-to-use version called ChatGPT Pro. The pace that ChatGPT is advancing is truly remarkable and leaves those across different industries to wonder what its capabilities will be in the future. Although healthcare will most likely be one of the last industries to adopt this transformative technological shift, I believe leaders in the healthcare space should be curious, and from what I saw at ViVE, many are. 

I’m sure many of you are wondering why Lark, as an AI company, is so welcoming to what some people may deem as a competitor? The truth is that there are many different types of AI, and we see ChatGPT as deeply complementary to Lark’s technology. It expands on the foundational set of tools that Lark’s own verticalized healthcare AI team has developed. And Lark’s technologists will be leveraging ChatGPT technologies within our platform to improve and accelerate our own AI to continue helping patients get healthier and live with or prevent chronic conditions.

While this excitement and buzz around ChatGPT is trending, it will likely take time before any real changes happen in healthcare due to ChatGPT. Ethical considerations are one of the biggest challenges of leveraging brand new technology in the healthcare industry— especially in regards to patient safety and privacy. When it comes to Lark, we need to balance the deterministic and problematic trade off, considering what areas are more open to risk than others. However, instead of feeling stuck on the current capabilities and risks that come along with this new technology, we’re energized.  We have the AI expertise and experience to leverage this complementary technology and enhance Lark’s capabilities in a safe and secure way. With our broad acceptance by the healthcare community, we’re focused on ensuring that the most validated aspects of this technology gain acceptance faster than they may otherwise have. 

Having been steeped in conversational AI in the past decade and having invested hundreds of millions in focusing on healthcare and patient needs with tech, I’m excited that AI is finally being debated and accepted more broadly in healthcare. When we started, our clients used to only have Siri and the Terminator as reference points. Times have changed, and Lark will continue to look towards new ways to use this technology to scale access to care, while safely navigating the challenges that come along with the adoption of new technologies for us and our healthcare partners. 

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1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2023/02/03/chatgpt-hits-100-million-microsoft-unleashes-ai-bots-and-catgpt-goes-viral/?sh=346c5473564e

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