OU Health Campus explores AI’s potential to improve health in Oklahoma

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OKLAHOMA CITY – Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing healthcare, research and education, creating new opportunities to improve the health of Oklahomans while also raising important questions about its risks and responsible use. Those opportunities and challenges took center stage at the first AI Symposium on the OU Health Campus, which brought together leaders from the university and clinical enterprise to explore how AI can shape the future of healthcare.

Carlos Bustamante, Ph.D., vice dean of research at the OU College of Medicine, said OU is uniquely positioned to help lead that effort.

“As the comprehensive academic medical center in the state, it’s incumbent upon us to take this challenge on,” Bustamante said. “We are who we’ve been waiting for. AI is a marquee component of the university’s strategic plan.”

Bustamante said Oklahoma’s health challenges create an opportunity to use AI to improve care and outcomes, particularly among groups that have been underrepresented in health research.

“Oklahoma is a great place for healthcare innovation,” Bustamante said. “We are ranked 49th in many health outcomes, with high rates of diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular and behavioral health conditions. We have an unbelievable opportunity to tap into populations that are understudied. This is a time that is ripe for technology to come in and potentially begin to level the playing field.”

AI is already being used in areas such as triaging medical images and helping clinicians with documentation, and it holds great potential for predicting patient risk and estimating the likelihood of hospital readmission, said Ahmed Arshad, M.D., MBI, medical director of Clinical AI at OU Health and assistant professor of pediatrics in the OU College of Medicine. In these applications, AI supports the clinician, while the patient is the ultimate beneficiary.

Arshad said AI also has the potential to reduce the amount of work clinicians take home and ease some of the burden that contributes to burnout. But he emphasized the need for a thoughtful approach to implementation, starting with lower-risk uses while building the data infrastructure and governance needed to support broader use.

That approach will become increasingly important as AI becomes more capable. Ian Dunn, M.D., executive dean of the OU College of Medicine and chief physician executive at OU Health, said the health system must recognize both the opportunities and risks.

“We have to welcome it rather than fear it, while acknowledging the risks,” Dunn said.

That includes recognizing that patients are already using AI to research their own health. Carolyn Kloek, M.D., MBA, clinical professor of ophthalmology at the OU College of Medicine and chief medical officer of OU Health, said some patients arrive with information generated by AI tools, changing the physician’s role from being the sole source of medical information to helping patients understand and evaluate what they find.

“It’s already happening,” Kloek said. “We’re taking the locus of information exchange from the physician being the holder of the content to the physician having a different role, which is helping the patient interpret the output – what’s true, what’s not true and what applies to them.”

Dunn said those conversations can ultimately give physicians more opportunities to focus on patients.

“It allows us to have much different conversations with our patients,” Dunn said. “It lets you level-set very quickly and have deeper conversations. You’re engaging with a model that is giving you numerous second opinions all at once.”

The rise of AI also means medical education must evolve. Dunn said educators need to consider how to build AI literacy and competence into physician training as the technology becomes part of clinical practice.

Bustamante said OU’s goal is to move quickly while remaining thoughtful about how AI is deployed.

“There is no reason, given the state of AI today and the momentum we have on campus, that we cannot meaningfully move the key indicators that we care about within five years,” he said. “We have unbelievable alignment at all levels of the university.”

The ultimate measure of success is whether AI helps OU improve health across the state.

“Our purpose is to change health outcomes,” Kloek said. “We will be successful if we can find ways to bring our unique advanced specialty skills and clinical research trials deeper into the state so that we can change those outcomes. The question is, how can AI help us do that?”