Northeastern faculty member receives Fulbright to advance AI in health care; will spend semester in Canada
As part of the semester abroad, Anand Nair plans to develop and test an AI-enabled remote patient monitoring system.
It may have only been recently that the concept of supply chains entered into the public lexicon. Worldwide economic disruptions wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine have made the term — and disruptions to it — a kitchen table issue.
But for some, supply chains have always been front of mind. Anand Nair is among them. A fellow of the Center for Emerging Markets and an associate of the Center for Health Policy and Healthcare Research, he has been intimately involved on the data and information side of supply chains for decades — first in the private sector, then across a 25-year career in academia.
“Supply chain has been a critically important area of business for a very long time — it just took these major disruptions to bring it into the fore,” said Nair, who is Professor & Jeff Bornstein Faculty Fellow in the Supply Chain & Information Management at Northeastern University.
But supply chain oversight has also become more technical and data-driven, as organizations coordinate business with suppliers halfway around the world. Businesses also have to contend with fluctuations in demand and frequent disruptions that can upend production and delivery schedules.
Whether you’re a manufacturer, large retailer or health care provider, organizations have had to incorporate new tools to manage risk and maintain continuity, Nair said. Some of those new and emerging technologies include machine learning and artificial intelligence, which can analyze large volumes of data in operational settings, and so-called “digital twins,” or virtual replicas of physical systems teams can use to simulate operations and diagnose problems.
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“Technology plays an important role in process management, in managing supplies,” Nair said. “There has been a lot of development going on, but it has accelerated over the last few years with AI.”
This fall, he’ll take that expertise to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship. Given out annually to scholars and professionals for international research and collaboration, Nair will assume the position of Canada Research Chair, and collaborate with researchers and clinicians on a project focused on AI-enabled remote patient monitoring — a once-niche area of health care that’s gradually becoming mainstream.
Working with Kingston General Hospital and partners at Queen’s Smith School of Business, Nair plans to develop and test an AI-powered system to assess patient risk for ending up back in the hospital in the days after they are initially discharged from a hospital stay.
It’s all part of a “paradigm shift” in the kinds of care a person receives out of the hospital and in their daily lives, and doing that specifically by using data to catch problems early before they snowball.
The shift toward artificial intelligence in health care has accelerated rapidly in recent years, particularly in remote patient monitoring, where clinicians can track patients’ health outside traditional settings using connected devices and digital platforms, Nair said.
The COVID-19 pandemic helped drive widespread adoption of these tools, with AI now playing a significant role in many health care settings, helping providers analyze large volumes of data, identify patterns and predict potential complications or acute problems.
“In health care, precision medicine is at the forefront right now, so we’re talking about trying to create processes that are geared toward the specific needs of individual patients,” Nair told Northeastern Global News. “What we are thinking about is [in] more of a remote patient monitoring context, when the patient has been discharged, this AI-enabled system should still prevail and help guide health care decisions,” he said.
Nair noted that he and his colleagues will produce “several academic papers” conveying these ideas.
“And hopefully we might be able to create a system …. that can actually be tested at the hospital, and then perhaps from there it can be launched to other hospitals as well,” he said.
Nair joined Northeastern University in 2023 after 12 years on the faculty at Michigan State University, with earlier appointments at the University of South Carolina and Auburn University. The focus of his research encompasses “supply chain, operations and technology management” more broadly, or “how firms, teams and individuals learn, adapt and organize to manage processes, supplies, technology and innovation” and any associated performance implications, he said.
This will be his second Fulbright appointment, following a previous term as a university distinguished chair at Aalto University in Finland in 2017. He said he is grateful to be able to undertake a second Fulbright, noting the “urgent need” for more personalized health care solutions.
Nair plans to be back on the Boston campus in spring 2027 to fulfill his teaching responsibilities.
