New online course from Purdue explores near-ubiquitous impact of AI in health care 

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. —The integration of artificial intelligence into health care already is in the process of transforming the way health care professionals diagnose, treat and manage patient care. 

“I would say that there’s the potential for AI-related applications to be involved in almost every part of the health care delivery system,” said Alan Zillich, professor of pharmacy practice at Purdue University. “It’s actually hard to think of an area where it may not be useful or could not be utilized.” 

That’s a key motivation Zillich and Purdue colleague Kyle Hultgren had in developing Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare Professionals, a cutting-edge online course designed to equip health care professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape. 

“This certainly was a recognized need,” said Hultgren, a clinical assistant professor of pharmacy practice. 

The new 100% online course is suitable for health care professionals involved in or adjacent to patient care. This includes physicians, nurses and pharmacists as well as administrators and individuals providing ancillary care services such as physical therapy, social work, respiratory therapy, and more. The course culminates in a certificate from Purdue marking their newly gained knowledge of AI and offers continuing education credits. 

Those taking the course will learn to: 

• Identify various applications and settings where AI is being utilized in health care today and where it will migrate to in the future. 
• Describe the technical underpinnings of how AI tools are built and function. 
• Analyze the clinical and social impacts of AI for patient care including how patients are using these tools as well as various ethical and regulatory issues. 
• Synthesize a solution to clinical cases using AI tools to improve their skills in the industry. 

AI technology already is being employed in diagnostics involving scans and imaging, where the job, in effect, is interpreting pictures. In the future, Ais could do a lot more than that. Research going on now is looking at what an AI might do diagnostically with access to everything a doctor knows about your health history, including your medications, labs, images, as well as your current range of symptoms. 

In the nearer term, AI is likely to be employed in a many ways that help with the processes of health care. For example, an “ambient AI” may take a recording of your doctor’s appointment and generate a detailed report, saving doctors and other health care personnel time and allowing your doctor to have more face time with you, instead of face time with a computer screen as they enter details of the visit. 

In addition, AI might drive a variety of supply chain improvements in health care, such as reducing medication shortages, predicting bed availability in hospitals, or maximizing the dispersion of ambulances. 

Meanwhile, patients, who have been arriving with information gleaned from “Doctor Google” for years, are now turning to “Doctor ChatGPT.” Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare Professionals looks at how patients are using AI and how to work with them to parse and understand such information.  

Zillich and Hultgren said developing and offering the course was a natural fit for Purdue, with its strengths in engineering, computer science and AI research and education and the second oldest pharmacy school in the U.S., consistently ranked among the top 10 nationally. 

“It’s right in line with the land-grant mission of our university, the idea that when there’s something new happening, something we need to get in the hands of practitioners as quickly as possible, that’s what we do,” Hultgren said. 

For more information and to register, visit this website.