At the end of 2024, Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai Health System appointed Mouneer Odeh as its inaugural chief artificial intelligence officer, a role in healthcare that’s been growing over the last few years.
Odeh has years of experience in healthcare data and analytics, most recently as VP of analytics at Virginia-based Inova Health System. He came into the role as artificial intelligence (AI) use is growing in the industry, from ambient scribes that take notes with clinicians to hearing devices with deep neural network technology.
At Cedars-Sinai, Odeh is in charge of implementing new technologies such as those AI scribes as well as tech that can scan images like X-rays and write job descriptions. In the future, he said the health system may explore revenue cycle management and capacity management, helping how patients move through the health system. For now, though, his day-to-day is focused on safely introducing new tech and meeting patients where they are.
“The space is evolving so rapidly that the future is happening now,” he said.
Odeh spoke with Healthcare Brew about the new(ish) job and the future of AI in the industry.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What is your day-to-day like?
A lot of it is really just making sure that our efforts are really driving toward our strategic objective and elevating the strategic impact of what AI can do for our organizations.
We’re really committed to responsible deployment of AI, so putting in place appropriate governance and accountability mechanisms to make sure that we are deploying it responsibly, ethically. We are testing for bias, and we have good systems in place to not only evaluate and validate before we put the technology into operation but also after it’s in operation, we want to continue to monitor and make sure that it’s doing what we thought it was supposed to do.
How are you ensuring the health system is meeting patients where they are?
We’re learning through this process. One of the things that we are very keen on is making sure that, whenever it makes sense, we do have a patient experience measure as one of our success factors. Human-in-the-loop is a philosophy. It’s a pillar of our AI governance policy.
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We are really starting to look at the role that AI can play in making sure that access to our health system is as equitable as possible, and doesn’t, in any way, increase disparities. Every time we deploy any model, we always validate it on our own data, and we evaluate the bias. We want to know if there’s a differential impact, and then we will include that in our criterion when we’re evaluating whether or not to adopt the technology.
How do you see the future of AI at Cedars-Sinai or in healthcare broadly shaking out?
In the short term, we have all these ideas of what we think we’re going to do, and the reality is it takes time. The technology isn’t ready. People aren’t ready. I’m really excited about the momentum that we have, but I’m also cautious of the way we think about it today, which is probably not the way it’s going to be 10 years from now.
[AI is] going to be pretty seamlessly embedded into clinical and operational workflows, and that’s going to hopefully unburden a lot of the things that really consume so much of our time and our attention, on things that we all wish we didn’t have to deal with. By freeing up that mental space, that bandwidth, I think it will allow us to be returned to the joy of why we came into healthcare in the first place.
At the end of the day, we will be more efficient. Some part of the future is that technology will be disruptive and maybe force us to think of new business models where we can sustain a new way of thinking about how we deploy that technology into people’s everyday lives.