"AI is not meant to replace clinicians."
I'm listening to Angela Adams, registered nurse and CEO of AI radiology follow-up management platform Inflo Health. Sharing why the company is a solution for clinicians, patients, and the health care industry as a whole, she says that artificial intelligence technology in health care is directed toward repairing chaos and harm. "It should replace all of the broken parts of health systems that we cannot continue to throw people at."
It started when Adams, then a critical care nurse at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, received a text from a colleague and friend who had gone to the ER with severe abdominal pain. Adams' friend was rushed into emergency surgery for acute appendicitis. While she was there, a radiologist caught a significant breast lesion, suspicious for malignancy, that required immediate follow-up. The radiologist documented it, but the finding vanished into the system.
"There was no communication to her primary care doctor," Adams recalls. "And so she went 10 months [until] delayed diagnosis and treatment."
A subsequent PET scan revealed metastatic breast cancer that had spread to her brain. Adams' friend died a year and a half later in 2020, the same year Adams co-founded Inflo Health with CTO Nate Sutton.
Adams, whose background spans critical care nursing and health care AI leadership -- long before the post-pandemic AI surge -- is using artificial intelligence to improve preventive care and patient follow-up in radiology. It's built around Inflo Health's mission, "never miss a follow-up."
Adam says that if Inflo Health had been in place, her friend would have received a text message stating that she had a follow-up due to the radiology findings, and that her doctor would have been notified as well.
How Inflo Health uses AI
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When radiologists spot suspicious findings on scans ordered for something entirely different, those discoveries often get lost in the system's chaos.
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