ASU Health has embarked on its mission to transform health care and create a new kind of health professional.
ASU Health includes four academic units — two of which are new to the university ecosystem. The John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering and the School of Technology for Public Health join the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation and the College of Health Solutions to form the educational foundation for ASU Health.
In addition, the Health Observatory builds on ASU’s existing relationship with Mayo Clinic to develop a better understanding of community health in Arizona, and the Medical Master’s Institute creates opportunities for health professionals and medical students to upskill in areas like pediatrics, gerontology, advanced nursing and nutrition.
In this first of a five-part series that will dive into the key areas of ASU Health, Heather Clark, with the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering and John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering, explains why health and engineering go hand in hand.
Note: Answers have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Question: Let’s start with the overview. How does engineering fit into ASU Health as it moves forward?
Answer: We have developed a one-of-a-kind engineering curriculum in order to reinforce the concepts that are being taught in the medical education curriculum. We start out by helping our future physicians understand how data is generated in the clinic, how that signal gets to them and what it means. Then, we give them some background into AI and how to use it as a tool and whether or not to trust it. Then, as the curriculum progresses, what we do is reinforce that curriculum through the lens of engineering, applying these two concepts to everything that they're learning.
For instance, as they're learning about the heart and the medical education curriculum, we're reinforcing through the lens of engineering by talking about the heart as a pump, valves, fluid, flow, how those change in disease and how we know, right? Then, how can we use AI to start to change how they're thinking about clinical care. Then, after their classes are done, we go into an innovation phase where basically the students work in teams to apply AI to solve real-world health care problems.
Q: Is the advancement in technology sort of what prompted this idea to integrate engineering into health care?
A: Absolutely. So, I’m a measurement scientist. I think that we need to walk into using data for decision-making with our eyes wide open. What does it really mean? But more importantly than that, AI is such a quickly evolving tool, whether the physicians are using it like an app, or just like voice to memo, or whether they're dealing with patients who have been using AI before they got there.
I really want our future physicians to understand how to first use AI as a tool, but second, how to evolve with it as it moves. Because what we teach today is not going to be what they're dealing with in five years.
Q: With the John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering, is ASU at the forefront of the engineering and health care intersection?
A: I think so. There are two other engineering medical schools right now, and they have different approaches. But I think ours has uniquely combined those concepts and really used them to reinforce that educational curriculum. We're not just adding on something else.
Q: Does the engineering component bring students into health care that might not have entered otherwise?
A: I think so. I have a STEM background and never went to medical school. I never considered it. I just did not think it was the right path for me. But there are a lot of engineers out there who can make a real impact in health care. And I think that this is an avenue for them to start to pursue it in a way that really aligns with their training and the way they like to learn. I think a lot of them will go on to be doctors. But one of the things that I have in mind for our future physician engineers is that, as they progress through, this it’s a mixed cohort. The medical students will be in these medical engineering classes, but we’ll also have medical engineers, and they’ll be working in teams to solve problems.
I really want the future physicians to continue to think in that mindset, and when they have a big idea 10 to 20 years down the road, to connect with engineering teams and start to think about how they could implement those. I think that would be a huge success.
Q: Let’s go into some details. How do you see engineering and AI fitting into health care?
A: There are so many opportunities, even if it’s just using AI as a tool to free up some time from note-taking and other paperwork so that you have more time to spend with your patient. I think telehealth will be very different. I see remote care as an area in which I think we could make a real impact.
For instance, with surgical robotics right now, you can go on YouTube and see somebody control the surgical robot from another country, doing a surgery on a grape or whatever. So, what else could you control? I think that with many different instruments or imaging modalities, you could start to think much more about remote care where the specialist — let’s say the radiologist — is not out there in the field, but in the AI hub, and an image can be processed and evaluated in a different way.
Q: Can you provide a specific example?
A: We’re building into the main floor of the medical school five medical suites of the future. Each one will be devoted to a different area of health care. And there'll be an AI hub that controls the suites. Students can start to think about, ‘OK, if we had an ICU at home, what would we need in the field of AI to really enable this?’ They exist right now but they can't be very far from the main hospital. What could we do to really make home health care a different story? So students will work on projects around this idea.
Q: Aside from AI, can you give other specific examples of how engineering might be used in ASU Health?
A: Let’s take medical imaging. Right now, an MRI produces an image because we ask it to. There's nothing about MRI that inherently produces an image. It's not like your cellphone. It produces data and we do a lot of post-processing, and a lot of people think about, well, how could AI change the way that we process those images? And that's great. But I would like our students to start to ask, and our researchers to start to ask, how we would change MRI if we weren't reliant on my eye making the assessment of the image but instead are using AI to do what my eye is doing. How much could we scale down that hardware? Could we make it something that we could put on a truck and bring to a remote area?
So those are the sorts of things that I think will really start to get exciting. How can we really envision changing the infrastructure and instrumentation?
Learn more in our 5-part ASU Health series
- Feb. 27 — Heather Clark: Why health and engineering go hand in hand
- March 6 — Jordan Coulston: The role innovation and entrepreneurship will play in ASU Health
- March 13 — Cora Fox: The intersection of humanities and medical care
- March 20 — Jyoti Pathak: Ways that AI could transform our health system
- March 27 — Swapna Reddy and Kristen Will: What health systems science is and how it will impact ASU Health
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