Inizio Medical Issues Urgent Call to Action for AI Adoption in HCA statement

A newly published AI roadmap, co-authored by the Healthcare Communications Association (HCA) and Inizio Medical’s Global Chief Artificial and Augmented Intelligence Officer, Matt Lewis, highlights the need for life sciences firms, pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology enterprises, medical device entities and technologists developing software as a medical device to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) in all aspects of healthcare communication or risk being left behind.

The statement hails generative AI as “one of the defining innovations of our professional lives” and provides a detailed prospectus for the adoption and implementation of AI across the healthcare communications sector. It aims to facilitate a greater understanding of how AI will revolutionise the sector.

The statement advocates that businesses should adopt clear policies to ensure their use of AI is ethical and appropriate, as part of embedding the new technology into their business. This should be based on the following set of core principles:

• Compliance, legal, & regulatory concerns: All users of generative AI must comply with applicable laws, regulations, and ethical guidelines.
• Privacy & confidentiality: Organisations should recognize that the improper use of AI tools could pose a risk to operations and customers.
• Inclusivity & respect: Data should promote equity and equality, respecting the diversity of society, and not reinforcing existing biases.
• Transparency: All organisations should seek to explain in clear and simple ways how their use of AI impacts employees, partners, and customers.
• Accountability: Users should be responsible for ensuring that the generated content produced using generative AI aligns with the organisation’s values, ethics, and quality standards.
• Monitoring & flexibility: In such a rapidly changing space, AI policy should only be set with regular review and careful assessment of impact, technological shifts, and changing industry standards.

The use of AI in communications has seen seismic developments with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 attracting one million users in five days and 100 million by January 2023. The latest developments in generative AI technology have the potential to continue to transform things further, offering a range of benefits in the field of healthcare communications, with use cases including writing, creative idea generation, and distilling and learning new information.

Commenting on the future use of AI in healthcare and medical communications, Matt Lewis continued: “This is a critical time in the evolution of both the communications field as well as in medical affairs more broadly. Both fields are at a juncture where society at large depends upon credible, accurate, relevant, scientific information. Medical Affairs has increasingly become a third pillar of the pharmaceutical enterprise partnering closely with R&D and Commercial.”

“In the same way innovations such as the steam engine and electricity transformed our world, AI is set to be one of the defining innovations of our lifetime. If people haven’t thought about how AI can benefit the patients and the clinicians we serve, now is the time to begin reflecting and taking action, because everything from this point will be changed as a result.”

Inizio Medical is an industry leader in the use of AI in medical and healthcare communications and an early adopter of the technology, having worked in the space for nearly 10 years prior to wider adoption. The team has completed over 500 projects utilising AI across all aspects of Medical Affairs for their international client portfolio. These have ranged from landscape assessments to scientific platform development, patient lay summaries to systematic literature reviews, and medical omnichannel campaigns.

You can read the full statement here.