Artificially intelligent avatars are becoming an increasingly important part of the health care delivery system. In professions as diverse as cardiology and psychotherapy, AI avatars are interacting with patients with positive results. These virtual doctors are representations of real doctors and have human-like characteristics such as voice inflections and facial expressions. By accessing the patient’s electronic medical records and listening to their voices they can provide a personal consultation and react in real time to questions.

Dr. Leslie Saxon and her colleagues at USC’s Center for Body Computing are at the forefront of this new form of telemedicine. A cardiologist and founder/executive director of the University of Southern California (USC) Center for Body Computing and USC Virtual Care Clinic, Dr. Saxon and her colleagues are creating a system of digital health care in which patients have the ability to access virtual doctors. In this Fast Company video, Dr. Saxon—who spoke about virtual health care at the 2016 Vision Monday Global Leadership Summit—demonstrates the holographic technology that can enable patients to visit a virtual doctor anywhere in the world.

“The virtual human is a very important piece of the offering of continuous health care,” Dr. Saxon explains. “We feel we can template our best experts at USC and we can create a virtual human army of experts that can reach anyone in the world with high end medical information that’s specific to them. And the important part of that agent is that it’s fueled by artificial intelligence, so it gets smarter and smarter.”