Building trust: The crucial bridge between AI and healthcare

For three decades, we’ve been committed to people living with epilepsy and their families, surrounding the patient and caregiver through every step of their care journey. In the ever-evolving healthcare landscape, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the digitalization of healthcare, is set to create new standards and advancements in care for people living with epilepsy and rare epileptic syndromes. This digitalization is revolutionizing the way we understand and approach these complex neurological disorders, with AI helping us to push the boundaries of healthcare and drug development by enabling us to support more precise diagnoses, detect patterns and trends, and aid disease prevention.

However, the successful integration of AI into healthcare relies heavily on a foundation of trust – trust from the public, medical professionals, and caregivers. We understand that this trust has improved drastically over the past few years, with events like COVID-19 necessitating remote digital healthcare, but there remains a distrust in the public domain. The main questions we are being asked are “Where is my data being used?”, “Who is looking at my data?” and “How will my data be used?”

Because of this, it is our role as experts in neurology to address these questions and be transparent. While the challenge of trust is not specific to UCB but industry-wide, we are continuously working to build that trust with patients, caregivers, and medical professionals.
Collaboration and partnerships are an essential way to build trust, and we know that we cannot do this alone. We must turn to expert digital partners, such as Microsoft, to support us on this journey. The continuous work we do together establishes a strong foundation for the future and landscape of neurology.

One example of how we’re using AI is the development of wearable technology – being able to track movement disorders not only helps patients but also increases our own understanding of how they manage their condition. The development of this technology also allows us to monitor patient data in real-time but has also enabled us to engage with a larger, more diverse patient pool within remote clinical trials. We can collect more data and ensure we secure better equity around patients, effectively reaching underserved populations.

Another area we are currently exploring is the use of ‘Digital Twins’ - a digital copy - to accurately reflect a physical human brain. The use of this modeling technology could assist in identifying the pattern of symptomatic behaviors such as seizures and, in principle, help medical professionals to individualize treatment based on the simulated behavior to predict how a specific patient might react to treatment.

Given the digital landscape is evolving rapidly, we must keep up with the pace and constantly look at ways we can digitalize our offering to secure a better outcome for our patients. It has never been more important to provide the best outcome for a patient across their entire journey and digital technology can help us achieve that.