Hartford Business Journal

HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | SEPTEMBER 8, 2025 15 (From left) Dr. Barry Stein, chief clinical innovation officer for Hartford HealthCare, listens as Aidoc CEO Elad Walach discusses the future of medical training with K Health Chief Product Officer Ran Shaul and Dr. Padmanabhan Premkumar, president of HHC Medical Group, during HHC's AI Summit. Contributed Photo Tech Disruption Hospitals, med schools rethink training as AI transforms healthcare industry stand the sensitivities of different models for different data types and work models. … That's how you embed that in your thinking process. There's no shortcut there." Dr. Padmanabhan Premkumar, senior vice president of Hartford HealthCare and president of HHC Medical Group, said he cautioned that doctors already are trying to deal with an overwhelming amount of informa- tion about patients. "There's just way too much infor- mation today for our clinicians to be able to function in front of a patient," he said. "On the back end, we have to find some way of aggregating data that makes sense to us." Given the challenges it presents for both new and career physicians, medical schools and healthcare facilities are now looking at ways to integrate AI into their training. 'Aggressively transforming life' Dr. Peter Yoo, Hartford Health- Care's chief academic officer, says it's clear that AI will continue to change how physicians work. "It's been said many times that we don't anticipate that doctors will be replaced by AI," Yoo said during a recent interview, "but doctors will be replaced by doctors who know how to use AI." Over the past two decades, he said, medical training has shifted from "needing to carry all of the knowledge of all of medicine in your mind at all times," to having a general familiarity with the information available. By David Krechevsky davidk@hartfordbusiness.com A rtificial intelligence is creating some dramatic changes in health care. Whether it's helping doctors more quickly analyze medical images, suggesting more personalized treatment options, or helping biophar- maceutical companies develop new therapies, AI continues to entrench itself in all aspects of the industry. That was one of the takeaways from Hartford HealthCare's inaugural AI summit in August. Another is that the way physicians and healthcare technicians are trained also must change to keep up with the rapidly evolving use of the technology. That point was raised during the summit by Dr. Nina Dutta, chair of Hartford Hospital's Department of Medicine. "AI is now integrated into all levels of what we do," Dutta said. "I think that's amazing, but it makes me think — what should we be doing in terms of training the physicians of the future? What is the skill set that they need?" She noted that the medical training she and others received now seems somewhat antiquated. "We were really taught to put a lot of knowledge in our brain and be able to spit it out, and the people that could spit out the most information were the best doctors," Dutta said. "I don't think that's true anymore, but I'm not quite sure where we should be focusing people as we prepare for this future." Two summit panelists were from companies that provide AI-related systems for the healthcare industry: K Health co-founder and Chief Product Officer Ran Shaul and Aidoc CEO Elad Walach. They each had suggestions for improving medical training, with Walach suggesting doctors need to learn statistics, and Shaul arguing providers need to learn about algorithms. "It's going to be mandatory," Shaul said. "In my mind, you need to under- Dimitris Bertsimas (left), an associate dean for business analytics at MIT, says medical training has not substantially changed since the 1920s and is long overdue for an upgrade. Contributed Photo Dr. Peter Yoo Continued on next page

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