Teaching Medical Students About Equity and AI

Dr. James Hildreth, MD, PhD, President and CEO of Meharry Medical College, is a passionate leader speaking about health equity, the power of AI in medicine and how aspiring physicians can be supported throughout their studies.  In this episode, Hildreth speaks about the influence of social determinants of health-on-health equity and offers advice on reducing inequities. Host Alex Maiersperger and Hildreth discuss impactful AI use cases in health care, such as the documentation of notes from patient and physician interactions, so that physicians can focus their time on the patient. Hildreth explains that AI can accelerate the discovery of disease causes, drugs and new interventions and that representation matters so that the data sets from genome sequencing also include people of African ancestry to ensure discoveries are representative of the diverse population and interventions are working. Lastly, Hildreth shares his leadership experience in making medical school more affordable for aspiring doctors and the importance of exposure to technology and AI from an early age.