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I'm Megna Chakrabardi and this is a podcast only special drop from On Point.

For the past few weeks we've been presenting to you a four-part special series called

Smarter Health, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of American Healthcare.

And in the series we're exploring the huge surge in funding for AI research in healthcare,

the impact it might have on your health, and the ethical moral and regulatory questions that come

with the rapid expansion of powerful technology in the world's most expensive healthcare system.

And we spent four months reporting this series and spoke on the record with approximately

30 experts in everything from primary care to electronic medical records to bioethics.

Our work was led by On Point Senior Editor Dori Shimer and she brought back more stories

than we could fit into our radio series, including this one for this special drop.

It's about how the COVID pandemic led to the first ever use of artificial intelligence,

specifically something called reinforcement learning to manage a massive public health challenge.

Dori takes it from here. Summer 2020. The worldwide COVID death toll hit

half a million. Countries that relied on billions of summer tourism dollars wondered

how long make it stay shut down. Greece had decided that we were going to open up their borders

of July 1st, 2020 to lead travelers in because they couldn't take the economic hit anymore.

...