Over at NUS, a compulsory minor in Biomedical Informatics was introduced for all NUS Medicine undergraduates to enable them to improve patient outcomes and information flow across healthcare systems by using a combination of data science, AI and other information technologies.
Professor Chong Yap Seng, Dean of NUS Medicine, said, “We have entered an era where AI and machine learning is commonplace. Our medical and nursing students need to be trained to have a competitive advantage. This means exposing them to different possibilities and scenarios that would allow them room to exercise critical thinking on how best they can apply their clinical skills to complement the vast potential of the current digital landscape, that could radically change the trajectory of medical and scientific advances for the better and usher in a new era of possibilities in digital health therapeutics.”
And a universal integration of AI into medical curricula is crucial to ensuring technologies are used safely and responsibly for healthcare insights.
At the AI Health Summit 2023, Associate Professor Daniel Ting from Duke-NUS and the SingHealth AI Office, who is the corresponding author of the proposal, highlighted the need to improve AI and data literacy of healthcare workers within and outside Singapore.
One way he believes this can be addressed is through clinical-AI partnerships, such as the SingHealth-AI Singapore partnership, which aims to co-develop an AI in Health curriculum: “Ultimately, we hope to educate all healthcare professionals and patients to be safe and responsible users, leveraging the cutting-edge AI and digital technologies to enable healthier local and global populations.”