Healthcare's data silos - held by payers, providers, and patients - are a critical barrier to AI adoption. Pandemic failures and new regulations are accelerating the need for change, according to Fawad Shaikh, global vice president of business development at Telus Health.
"Fragmentation is no longer acceptable," Shaikh stated. "We learned hard lessons through COVID about how data silos can cripple an ecosystem."
Shaikh, alongside Saurabh Mishra, global head of Google Cloud business at Quantiphi Inc., discussed their work on building a unified data foundation for AI at Google Cloud Next. Their efforts focused on consolidating data from disparate sources into a single platform.
Quantiphi's proprietary AI agent, Codeaira, was key to accelerating this process. Telus Health then built reusable data products and a scalable sandbox for AI agents, automating tasks like provider payment processing and physician inbox management. This has significantly improved efficiency, with one application reducing document processing burdens by half.
"Now that we've got our data in a place where we can leverage it to train some of these AI agents, the use cases are just exploding," Shaikh added. The focus is on creating a "new nervous system for a global healthcare platform."