Every year, University of Florida College of Medicine health care professionals provide over 1 million appointments, treating patients from all 67 Florida counties, 50 states and internationally through the extensive UF Health Physicians network.

Making sure all patients have access to the health care and physician experts they need in a timely manner is a top priority. As part of an initiative under the patient care pillar of the College of Medicine’s strategic plan, faculty and staff are implementing a series of changes to streamline the scheduling process and enhance the patient experience across the board.

“Patients are already stressed when they are confronting health care concerns,” said Jamie B. Conti, M.D., FACC, chair of the department of medicine. “We want to make the patient experience positive and seamless. Many talented people are working hard to improve access. I’d like patients to feel that communication with us is easy and their experience is first-rate.”

With today’s patients continuously tuned into smart devices, it makes sense that soon, a medical chatbot you interact with online will be able to use conversational language to communicate with and educate patients in much the same way we now interact with Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

What may have sounded like science fiction just a few years ago is on the precipice of reality. UF’s strides in the field of artificial intelligence, including a $70 million partnership with the Silicon Valley-based technology company NVIDIA, are leading to research and industry innovations across all disciplines.

At the College of Medicine, experts say a focus on AI will result in better patient care, advancements in clinical research and new techniques to train the next generation of clinicians and medical scientists.

Barry Byrne, M.D., Ph.D., was recently named Innovator of the Year during UF Innovate | Tech Licensing’s fifth annual Standing InnOvation event. Byrne, the associate chair of pediatrics and director of the Powell Gene Therapy Center at UF, has dedicated his career to pursuing novel gene therapies for treating diseases such as Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, Friedreich’s ataxia and Pompe disease.

Byrne considers it his “obligation to save the children” living with debilitating muscle diseases, said Hera Lichtenbeld, Ph.D., who manages Byrne’s portfolio at Tech Licensing.

In addition to being an excellent clinician scientist, Byrne is a successful entrepreneur. He has co-founded several biopharmaceutical companies such as Lacerta Therapeutics and AavantiBio. Manuela Corti, Ph.D., P.T., Byrne’s colleague and AavantiBio co-founder, accepted the trophy for him.

During the event, six teams of inventors were also recognized for their Inventions of the Year, including faculty at the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at UF Health and UF Scripps Biomedical Research.