Meet Our New Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer

Harnessing AI safely and ethically takes thoughtful leadership. It can drive efficiency, supercharge research and improve patient outcomes. We asked Alda Mizaku about her work and vision for Children’s National Hospital.

What excites you about your new role?

I am passionate about the opportunity to leverage technology to create better experiences for children and families. Embracing innovation can help us create more health equity for our community. This is an exciting time in healthcare. I'm committed to leading the way with compassionate and cutting-edge solutions. This includes realizing the full potential of medical data from electronic healthcare records and other sources. AI can help us develop treatment plans tailored specifically for each child. It also can make proactive recommendations to coordinate patient care.

What have you seen AI accomplish in medicine and how do you envision its growth and impact in pediatrics?

AI yields helpful insights to understand each patient’s individual needs. It takes complex medical data and makes it more useful. It can help us diagnose disease and improve care coordination for each patient family. AI fits very well into pediatrics since children’s hospitals put a lot of effort into research and development. For example, in rare disease, there’s an emphasis on building models to understand a condition’s genetic composition. AI gives us the opportunity to find solutions and intervene more quickly to change lives. This is the future of pediatric medicine.

How will Children’s National use AI to improve patient care?

We have been busy creating an enterprise cloud data platform. It will allow us to bring all of the hospital’s data into one place and create one true source of information. This one-stop-shop will make it much easier for our researchers and care providers to access the information they need to make a difference for patients. AI will help with operational efficiencies. It will give us a clearer picture of which units across the institution are busy or have extra capacity. It can recommend ways to eliminate bottlenecks. This reduces wait times and allows us to help more patients, which helps improve health equity.

How can AI HELP OUR faculty?

The beauty of AI is that it can help faculty focus more on patient care and less on administrative tasks. Jessica Herstek, MD, our chief medical informatics officer, is leading our pilot of an AI -based ambient listening technology that creates notes during patient encounters. The clinician focuses on their patient.