The Doctor of the Future Is Already Here
Prof. Ran Balicer is helping lead Israel’s effort to integrate AI into medicine while maintaining rigorous clinical standards and human oversight.
Prof. Ran Balicer and his colleagues at Clalit Health Services are leading a far-reaching effort to integrate artificial intelligence into clinics and hospitals. “In hundreds of thousands of cases, collaboration between human physicians and AI systems improved patient outcomes and helped prevent illness and mortality,” he says.
Currently Deputy Director-General and Chief Innovation Officer at Clalit Health Services, Balicer earned his at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and now heads the health domain at the University’s national artificial intelligence initiative, "The Institute". A full professor at BGU, he has become one of Israel’s leading figures and a global trailblazer in medical innovation and the growing role of AI in clinical care.
In an unusual role for a public health physician, his work spans medicine, technology, and research, with a particular focus on bringing artificial intelligence into the healthcare system in practical, measurable ways. The goal is not innovation for its own sake, but better care: sharper diagnostics, more efficient treatment processes, improved patient outcomes, and ultimately, saved lives.
For Balicer, the question is no longer whether AI will enter the clinical office, but how deeply it will reshape it. He believes artificial intelligence is on its way to becoming basic healthcare infrastructure, as indispensable as electricity. In certain fields, particularly medical imaging, scientific evidence already shows that intelligent systems can outperform human clinicians. As that evidence continues to accumulate, he argues, AI-assisted medicine will increasingly become the standard of care, and it is our task to provide the evidence.
Yet Balicer does not believe physicians are becoming redundant. Much of a doctor’s daily work, he notes, is consumed by technical, bureaucratic, and administrative burdens. Artificial intelligence has the potential to dramatically reduce the time spent on those responsibilities, allowing clinicians to focus more fully on patient interaction and the most meaningful clinical decisions.
Even so, human oversight will largely remain essential. Physicians, he says, will still be needed to ascertain that recommendations are accurate and appropriately tailored to individual patients, their lifestyles, and their personal preferences.
Patients and healthcare professionals alike continue to approach AI-based tools with caution, and Balicer believes that skepticism is justified. Very few systems, he notes, have undergone rigorous evaluation using accepted medical standards, while many concerns associated with AI technology, including hallucinations, bias, and inconsistent responses, remain unresolved.
At the same time, he cautions against treating artificial intelligence as a single, uniform technology. More established approaches such as machine learning and deep learning differ significantly from newer generative AI systems, which still present substantial unresolved challenges despite their enormous promise.
BGU Is Building a Strong AI Health Ecosystem
At Ben-Gurion University, much of this work is grounded in the University’s close relationship with Soroka University Medical Center, which Balicer describes as one of BGU’s greatest strengths in healthcare innovation. Despite facing exceptionally complex challenges, Soroka continues to deliver high-quality medical care while simultaneously advancing research and innovation.
BGU, he adds, is also home to a significant concentration of leading artificial intelligence researchers from Israel and abroad, alongside major investments in healthcare AI research and development. In his assessment, Israel is now engaged in a global race to maintain leadership in what may be the most consequential scientific field of the present era. National committees, he notes, have already emphasized the urgent need to accelerate the training of researchers and expand development efforts, placing much of the responsibility on Israeli universities.
Within that context, Balicer describes President Prof. Daniel Chamovitz’s initiative to establish "The Institute" as transformative. According to him, the initiative strengthens researchers in the field, attracts leading international talent, and supports the development of advanced scientific and technological tools.
The Institute brings together researchers and professionals from science, technology, medicine, and government in an effort to connect academic research with real-world implementation, an effort in which Balicer has played an active role from its earliest stages.
AI Is Already Improving Diagnosis and Prevention
One example of that effort is the AI in healthcare program recently launched under the academic umbrella of The Institute, which Balicer describes as Israel’s most advanced course for senior healthcare leaders in artificial intelligence. The program is designed to equip executives with the tools needed to formulate organizational strategies for implementing AI responsibly across healthcare systems and commercial companies operating in the field.
Among the lecturers and researchers participating in the program are experts who helped develop some of the world’s most advanced systems for the responsible implementation of AI in healthcare, as well as tools already in use throughout Clalit clinics. The program also includes lecturers from leading American institutions, including BGU alumna and renowned MIT researcher Regina Barzilay.
In practical terms, Balicer says, artificial intelligence is already enabling earlier disease detection, uncovering hidden medical conditions, shortening medical procedures, and improving recovery outcomes. One of its most important strengths, however, lies in reducing diagnostic errors.
The idea that a healthcare system could warn a person about the risk of disease before symptoms appear no longer belongs to science fiction. Physicians can already call patients in for monitoring or preventive treatment long before a condition becomes acute. In some cases, those interventions can save lives and help shift medicine away from reacting to illness and toward predicting and preventing it.
A Human-AI Partnership Is Taking Shape
There is also growing evidence that collaboration between physicians and AI systems can improve care quality while reducing serious illness and complications. Balicer sees this not as a competition between humans and machines, but as a new partnership. Still, he stresses that these systems must be introduced carefully and responsibly, with trust built gradually among both healthcare professionals and patients.
Looking ahead, Balicer is convinced that within a relatively short time medicine will rely heavily on artificial intelligence, much as computerized systems have already become inseparable from interactions between doctor and patient.
Even so, he does not believe technology will replace physicians. At least in the foreseeable future, he sees AI as something that will strengthen doctors rather than displace them, allowing far better use of their limited time. In some specialized areas, physicians may eventually work alongside AI systems that function almost like colleagues: digital assistants capable of carrying out certain defined tasks directly with patients rather than merely supporting clinical decisions from the sidelines.
Still, Balicer cautions that while the road ahead remains long and complex, it is the only path towards sustainable effective healthcare provision for all.
