For champions of AI in healthcare, the COVID-19 crisis affords an unignorable opportunity to trumpet the technology’s current contributions while directing attention to its potential for helping fight public-health crises to come.

As vice chair of the Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, Brandon Allgood, PhD, is up for the assignment.

In a contributed piece published by The Hill, Allgood recaps some themes that emerged as AI entered the healthcare ecosystem—streamlining clinical workflows, speeding clinical diagnostics, enabling drug discovery—before taking a look at what some specific AI companies are doing to help battle COVID.

Among the businesses he introduces is New York-based Envisagenics, which has developed an AI platform that analyzes 1,000 polymerise chain reaction (PCR) testing samples in two hours. The current analysis takes up to two days.