Responsible innovation
As enthusiasm around AI grows, UC San Diego leaders are equally focused on ensuring its responsible use.
Karandeep Singh, MD, inaugural chief health AI officer at UC San Diego Health and Endowed Chair in Digital Health Innovation at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, emphasized that successful AI adoption depends on rigorous governance, transparency and scientific evaluation — not simply deploying new technologies.
“It’s not enough to just measure a key performance indicator (or KPI),” Singh said, who is also the executive director of UC San Diego Health’s Jacobs Center for Health Innovation. “You need to wrap it with an evaluation design that lets you figure out if the KPI got better, if it actually meant something.”
Singh said every AI tool introduced into a health system should be evaluated the same way researchers evaluate new medical interventions: by measuring outcomes, publishing the results and allowing others to scrutinize the evidence.
“We need to equip our health systems to be learning health systems,” he said. “If you can’t do measurement, you can’t actually know if it worked. You write it, you report it and let other experts take a critical look at it. That’s the only way, collectively, we’re going to get to something that resembles a better health system than what we have today.”
That balanced, evidence-driven approach has become a defining principle of UC San Diego’s AI strategy. Rather than asking where AI can be inserted into health care, leaders are asking where it can solve meaningful problems for patients, providers and communities — and then rigorously proving that it does.