AI and the Future of Measuring What Matters in Healthcare

Measuring health outcomes that truly matter to patients has long been a challenge, with traditional methods relying on fragmented data, burdensome surveys, and metrics that often fall short of guiding better care. In this keynote, Dr. Gallani will share recent work exploring how artificial intelligence can help overcome these barriers. She will discuss how AI can integrate unstructured and behavioral data to provide a more complete picture of health, and how it can ease persistent challenges in implementing patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs)—from low patient engagement to the difficulty clinicians face in applying results to practice. At the same time, she will highlight the challenges of implementing AI in healthcare, including resistance from users, trust in adoption, and the ethical boundaries that must be carefully defined. This session will offer a balanced vision for how AI can empower medical affairs professionals to generate actionable insights, strengthen evidence, and ultimately deliver better health.

Susanna Gallani is the Tai Family Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Accounting and Management unit. At HBS, she teaches in various executive education programs, including the Program for Leadership Development, Managing Health Care Delivery, Driving Corporate Performance, several custom programs, and courses on the strategic implementation of Value-based Health Care. She has previously taught Executing Strategy in the MBA elective curriculum and Financial Reporting and Control in the required curriculum. She collaborates with Harvard Medical School by teaching and co-directing the Health Care Delivery and Leadership module in the required course Essentials of the Profession II. She teaches in the post-graduate medical education programs Surgical Leadership Program and Leadership in Medicine: Southeast Asia.