Dr. Sam Nordberg ’99, chair of psychiatry and behavioral health at Atrius Health and Reliant Medical Group, joined students, many of them on a premed track, for an informal chat exploring how AI is transforming health care.
Nordberg’s own career path took a somewhat circuitous route, he explained. After majoring in economics and computer science at Bowdoin, Nordberg chose a financial career and landed a Wall Street job that found him in the north tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. “My life took a big turn,” he said. “I remember being under a table and thinking ‘If I get out of this, I’m going to go do something with my life.’ That’s not a knock on finance careers,” added Nordberg, “I really enjoyed the work I was doing, but I wanted to find something that meant more to me.”
Nordberg subsequently worked as an EMT in New York City, where he saw how inadequate the system was for treating people with mental health problems, and this set him on his current career path, he explained. Now, in his role as a prominent clinical psychologist and behavioral health specialist, Nordberg plays a key part in managing the primary care of about a million patients in Massachusetts (that’s about one in six of the population). “We do everything but the hospital,” he explained.
The US health care system is in crisis, however, he warned, due to spiraling costs and mounting demand for its services. “We are hopelessly outgunned when it comes to managing, in particular, the mental health needs of our patients. Post-pandemic mental health in the United States has gotten consistently worse, and anxiety disorders now represent a massive number of of folks in the US—about 20 percent of us.”
This is where AI is coming in to play and can offer real hope, said Nordberg, and it’s a solution increasingly embraced by the program he works on. “We are starting to build more and more either direct care or physician support technologies using AI and digital tools.” These tools, if properly applied, he stressed, can play a key part in diagnosing, treating, and managing health care needs at a much-reduced cost, while also easing the strain on overworked doctors and therapists.