There is a “critically important” and “counterintuitive” step hospitals and health systems should take when implementing AI into the heart program, Faraz Ahmad, MD, medical director for AI strategy for the Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute Center for AI in Chicago, said in an episode of Becker’s “Cardiology and Heart Surgery Podcast.”
Question: What is one step other hospitals or health systems could take to improve their data and decision-making with AI?
Dr. Faraz Ahmad: Two things come to mind. First, it’s critically important for health systems to figure out how to empower their entire workforce to use these tools. With natural language interfaces, these tools have become genuinely accessible — people can build meaningful things without deep technical backgrounds. Giving staff the training, the secure environment, and access to the data they need to take their ideas into action is essential. That said, you do need guardrails: security protocols, cost monitoring so the health system isn’t facing a massive bill from cloud token usage. But the fundamental goal is empowering front-line workers to start solving problems — or pairing them with engineers who can help them do it efficiently.
Second — and this might be counterintuitive — maybe they don’t need to take a step this week. AI is a fast-moving space, and there’s enormous pressure to adopt. But it’s probably more important to step back and ask: what are our actual priorities? What evaluation and governance systems do we have in place? Which partners do we want to go deep with? No one benefits from dozens of pilots that never scale. Identify your key priorities, go deep, make them work, and then scale them. That’s where the real work — and honestly, the most rewarding work — happens.
Hear more from Dr. Ahmad and other cardiology leaders here.
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