Live from the studio, it's Informatics in the Round! Okay, we aren't technically live, but we are bringing you an extra special episode from the Penn Engineering Online studio! Since all our guests are from the University of Pennsylvania, we thought we would sit down in-person to enjoy this lively discussion. Today we are talking all about chatbots and the future of generative AI in medicine. We discuss topics such as what chatbots are, whether they present the markers of true artificial intelligence, what innovations we are looking forward to, and the benefits and barriers to integrating them into our healthcare settings.

First, we had Dr. Angela Bradbury, an Associate Professor of Medicine and a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also founder of the Penn Telegenetics Program, a national program using telehealth and digital tools to increase access to genetic medicine. Her research program has been developing patient-centered digital tools, including chatbots, to address the use of genetics in medicine and a limited genetics workforce. As a medical ethicist, she is particularly interested in how we responsibly deploy digital tools and generative AI in medical practice to improve patient outcomes.

We also had Lyle Ungar, a Professor of Computer and Information Science at Penn. He researches the psychological dimension of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. His research group of psychologists and computer scientists study what language reveals about physical and mental well-being. They are building culturally aware chatbots for mental health support and teaching "soft skills" to high school students.

Finally, we had Chris Callison-Burch, a Professor of Computer and Information Science whose AI course at Penn has one of the highest enrollments at the university with about 750 students. His research focuses on applications of large language models to address long-standing challenges in artificial intelligence. He’s a leading expert on AI and has appeared in front of Congress as well as on many podcasts to discuss the future of generative AI and intellectual property. We are so grateful to have all these expert guests on this episode and in the room with us!

Oh, and we had a guest star hosting this episode—Ellie Shuert, our production assistant, stepped out from behind the scenes. She is freshly graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English and Linguistics. Her curiosity about AI and natural language processing gave our guests lots to think about, and it was so fun to let her direct an episode.

Thank you so much to Penn Engineering Online for hosting us in your beautiful studio space! It was the perfect place to enjoy this conversation. If you are listening, we suggest maybe going over to our YouTube channel to watch us film in such a cool space!

This is truly one of our favorite episodes of the year, and we are so excited to share it with you!

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Welcome, everyone, to your introductory course in public health informatics! On today's episode, we discuss all things public health, including what it is, how it varies on a state and national level, and how health departments respond to public health crises. We demystify some of our misconceptions about how the public health system works, like how state departments are separate from the CDC, how we share disease statistics such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how our medical history may or may not travel with us from state to state. Of course, our question always is, why does informatics matter in this conversation? Our guests have many ideas about how we can utilize informatics to create more efficient means of sharing data and, by extension, improving our overall public health.

Dr. Bryant Thomas Karras is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer at the State of Washington Department of Health and a faculty member at the University of Washington's School of Public Health. He is a physician, biomedical engineer, and informatician who uses his multifaceted experience to promote interoperability and help various agencies utilize new technologies in their public health efforts. He's advised health departments on a local, state, and national level, including the Center of Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Jessie Tenenbaum is an Associate Professor at Duke University School of Medicine, and she recently concluded a five-year tenure as the Chief Data Officer for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Her work focuses on enhancing data-driven decision-making to improve public health outcomes and finding AI methods to improve whole person health. She's served on the editorial board for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, on AMIA's Board of Directors, and on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine, all while advocating for women in STEM and precision medicine efforts. We were so thankful to have both of these experts on this episode!

Last but not least, we were joined by a new guest—Lauren Malloy joined us as a co-host for this episode. Lauren is the administrative coordinator for the Artificial Intelligence for Ambulatory Care Innovation Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, which investigates how technology can address healthcare challenges. Her insights into how public health issues manifest in our daily lives were invaluable, and we were honored to have her as a guest star!

We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did filming it!

"Cheat Sheet" to the acronyms discussed in this episode:

-AMIA: American Medical Informatics Association

-APHL: Association for Public Health Laboratories

-CDC: Center for Disease Control and Prevention

-CDO/CIO/CMIO: Chief Data Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Medical Informatics Officer

-ECR: electronic case reporting

-EHR: electronic health record

-EIS: Epidemic Intelligence Service

-IIS: Immunization Information System

-IPS: International Patient Summary (Canada)

-HHS: Department of Health and Human Services

-NPI: National Patient Identifier, also National Provider Identifier

-PPRL: Privacy Protecting Record Linkage

-VCI: verifiable clinical information

Make sure to follow our Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and TikTok accounts so you can stay up to date on all our new content. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @kbjohnsonmd. You can find us wherever you typically get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Instagram: @infointhernd

Twitter: @infointhernd

Threads: @infointhernd

TikTok: @infointhernd

Website: https://www.kevinbjohnsonmd.net/