SUNY Orange embraces AI as teaching aide to prepare students for constantly changing health care field
Staff said they have been meeting with consultants to learn how to train students to use AI programs to diagnose patients quicker, better analyze X-rays and better predict patient outcomes.
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Leaders of a Hudson Valley college are going all-in on artificial intelligence training, especially for students planning careers in health care.
SUNY Orange Provost Erika Hackman showed News 12 some of the AI tools she and her colleagues have been exploring as they work on a new AI training program for their medical students.
Local medical providers and Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine are helping shape the program.
"This is the launch of the next phase, which is that very direct partnership — intentional partnership - between AI and healthcare," Hackman said Monday during an interview in her office.
State Sen. James Skoufis visited with SUNY Orange leaders at Morrison Hall Monday to announce he secured $250,000 in the state budget to help start the AI program.
Staff said they have been meeting with consultants to learn how to train students to use AI programs to diagnose patients quicker, better analyze X-rays and better predict patient outcomes.
SUNY Orange Workforce Development executive director Stephanie Compasso-Geyer said she does not expect AI to erase jobs the way it has in other sectors.
She expects it to help already overworked health care workers work smarter, save time, and probably save lives.
"It's not about, 'Are these tools going to replace people?,'" she said, "but 'How can we train people to be able to become thought partners with these tools and utilize them in a way that's going to help our system, help our patients?'"
While it is still unclear what the AI component to SUNY Orange's medical programs will look like, school leaders plan to mold the AI component as they go along.
Peter Bambino, a student advisor to the school's board of trustees, said medical students, especially, must be well-schooled in AI.
He said the upside is too big to ignore. "People need to learn about it now at the college in the right environments," he said, "where faculty, professors and other students can learn together and develop together."
SUNY Orange leaders said they are still in the research phase of the program's development.
They plan to have an intensive AI training component for medical students by early 2026.
