Ottawa is earmarking $200 million for health in its national "AI for All" strategy. It remains to be seen what the scientific evidence really supports, and at what cost.
The Canadian National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, called AI for All, presented by Prime Minister Mark Carney, reserves $200 million for the health sector. The ambition is to get AI out of the labs to confront concrete problems in the healthcare system.
The main uses are clinical stewardship tasks: automation of appointment making and patient reminders, assisted writing of consultation notes by software "scribes", assistance in reading imaging examinations and analyses. There is also pharmaceutical research, where models allow us to explore a much larger space of candidate molecules than would a manual screening.
Canada's National Observer, however, raises the question that the announcement leaves open: what part of this promise is based on evidence, and what costs — financial and health — are associated with this bet? Identifying a promising molecule does not mean having a drug: it is only one step out of many before clinical use.
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