Artificial intelligence was supposed to transform health care. It hasn’t.

The biggest barrier to the use of artificial intelligence in health care has to do with infrastructure.

At a conference in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton, British cognitive psychologist and “godfather” of AI, said radiologists would soon go the way of typesetters and bank tellers: “People should stop training radiologists now. It’s just completely obvious that, within five years, deep learning is going to do better.”

Health systems need to enable algorithms to access patient data. Over the last several years, large, well-funded systems have invested in moving their data into the cloud, creating vast data lakes ready to be consumed by artificial intelligence. But that’s not as easy for smaller players.

But more than five years since Hinton’s forecast, radiologists are still training to read image scans. Instead of replacing doctors, health system administrators now see AI as a tool clinicians will use to improve everything from their diagnoses to billing practices. AI hasn’t lived up to the hype, medical experts said, because health systems’ infr... See more