Giving Compass' Take:

• Jacob Bell describes how AI could change the diagnosis process and why some are hesitant to implement it in hospitals. 

• How can the risks of AI in medicine be mitigated? What research is needed to ensure that AI can make a positive impact on healthcare? 

• Learn about unlocking the potential of AI for social good.

Express Scripts, one of the nations biggest pharmacy benefit managers, keeps roughly 22 petabytes of healthcare data. That's about the same storage as 16 billion floppy disks or 86,000 of the new iPhones.

The company is learning a great deal about its 80 million members from this staggering amount of data — from where they live to their medical history. And with the help of complex algorithms, so are its computers.

Artificial intelligence, a technology that has drawn pharma's interest with the promise of supercharging computer-aided drug discovery, has in recent years also caught the attention of the prescriber side of the market. So far it's unclear exactly what effect AI will have on prescribing, though experts generally agree it will be quite a while, if at all, before the technology starts making decisions in place of a doctor or pharmacist.

Rather, payers and big tech companies are exploring how AI can help healthcare providers make more informed decisions for patients.

"If you think about prescribing, there's been a bit of technology involved in assisting prescribers in making the right decision for a very long time," Tina Moen, deputy chief health officer at IBM Watson Health, told BioPharma Dive. "AI is the next step, the next evolution of that."

The evolution won't happen overnight, however, as the technology continues to mature and prescribers, who largely operate autonomously, weigh the pros and cons of giving machines a seat at the table.

Read the full article about AI in medicine by Jacob Bell at Healthcare Dive.