AI can help clinicians to better address health risks from climate change

So that brings up a really interesting way to get started.

You know, we're here at Health Europe.

We're surrounded by people who are talking about and investing heavily in innovation and technology.

You were just talking about the potential at the start of your journey in this space.

It still feels like this climate and health intersection isn't part of the main conversation.

What do you think would happen if that really changed?

Yeah, I think we're getting there.

We're seeing more momentum around people realizing that as we have more and more severe weather events that are happening with greater frequency and that are really affecting the health of people in ways that are so visceral, and not just the individuals, but the systems that take care of them, Hospitals are often on the front lines of responding to a natural disaster that happens.

And being able to use data effectively to predict when an extreme weather event may lead to a surge of patients so you could more proactively outreach those most vulnerable populations and make sure they're good, make sure that they're not going to end up in the emergency room at a time where capacity may be throttled.

I think is really the promise that we're hoping to see by connecting the dots between environmental information, weather information, with health information, all the signals that you talked about from personal wearables that are all now augmented by AI and the promise of AI to stitch these together and not only create better predictions, but turn that into better personalized action, I think is the hope.

And health...

And the sister conferences have started to invite us into this conversation over the past few years.

But we hope that we can actually accelerate more action in this space.

So thinking about more action in this space, help us understand kind of what's different about this moment.

Why now? It's been very clear in the literature about the impact that weather, climate, environmental factors have on health outcomes for individuals and for communities.

What's different about the innovation agenda at the moment that gives you a lot of optimism and hope that now is really the chance to drive more action?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of pieces that have started to come together.

So one, I think there's greater awareness of the health impacts of climate change that is not only being recognized for its health impacts, but its financial impacts.

Hospitals that are on the front lines of climate disasters have more and more costs that they're paying, and that's driving an increasing shift in investments upstream.

Still not as much as we would like to see.

And we have much better data interoperability with being able to connect health data from personal devices to your medical records at your doctor's office.

And the environmental data is getting better and better too with AI prediction.

And so we're able to better stitch all this information together.

And large language models, which I know are a hot topic, are actually a really critical ingredient here because one of the core challenges with connecting the dots here is we have different types of data.

And we're talking about, you know, heat data combined with knowing someone might be taking a specific medication that puts them at greater risk because of the extreme heat, but whether or not they have air conditioning, All of those data points exist in many different modalities.