Dr. Amol Verma is a member of T-CAIREM and a doctor with St. Michael’s Hospital.
(Originally posted in the T-CAIREM Buzz newsletter, January 2021)
To launch our first newsletter, we caught up with T-CAIREM member and former Rhodes scholar Dr. Amol Verma. We wanted to learn more about his work incorporating AI in medicine and his recent projects. (It turns out he's also something of a singer as well.)
What inspired you to pursue medicine as a career?
I've wanted to be a physician for as long as I can remember. My mother is a family doctor. We would often see her patients in the grocery store or shopping mall, and I was struck by how appreciative they were of her care. I enjoyed science and problem solving, and I saw medicine a wonderful way to apply those skills to help people.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I am most proud of co-founding and co-leading GEMINI, along with Dr. Fahad Razak, and a number of colleagues across the University of Toronto. GEMINI is a hospital data and analytics platform that we initially started to help measure the quality of care being provided in hospitals and identify opportunities for improvement. Over the last five years, we've gone from an idea to a team of more than 20 full-time staff that supports a provincial quality improvement program. We now work with almost 30 hospitals across Ontario.
What do you like to do when you aren’t working?
Spend time with my wife and toddler. We’ve been enjoying the winter by making snow-people and singing about Rudolph and Frosty.
What are you working on now that you’re really excited about?
There are two projects. At St. Michael’s Hospital, we recently implemented CHARTwatch, an AI-based early warning system that identifies patients at risk for clinical deterioration in hospital. Second, the GEMINI data platform has collected detailed clinical data about more than 400,000 hospital admissions, and this will be remotely accessible to researchers. There are many opportunities for involvement in both projects, so please contact me if you’d like to learn more.
What excites you the most about the possibilities of AI in healthcare?
I believe AI can help make healthcare more effective, efficient and compassionate. The key will be figuring out how computers and humans can work together to take advantage of our relative strengths. AI can help automate and simplify mundane and time-consuming tasks. There is also danger. It could exacerbate biases, worsen inequities and displace human interactions. I’m most excited about being among the group of clinicians who is working to implement AI carefully and compassionately.
