Professor Ian Wong holds the Regius (Royal) Chair in Pharmacy at Aston University in England, a prestigious position established by the late Queen Elizabeth II to commemorate her 90th birthday. He is also a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacy at the University of Hong Kong. In 2021, he was awarded HK$20 million by the Hong Kong SAR Government to lead two major big data research programs focused on evaluating the long-term outcomes of COVID-19 and the safety of COVID vaccines.

Professor Wong has published over 700 articles in leading journals, including those in the Nature portfolio, JAMA Network, The Lancet family, and BMJ journals. He has been ranked among the top 1% of scholars worldwide from 2015 to 2025. An article in The Lancet Psychiatry referred to him as the "Father of Healthcare Big Data Research in Hong Kong," a testament to the significant number of researchers his team has trained in this field.

Agentic AI: Transforming Healthcare with Autonomous Intelligence
Agentic Autonomous Intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize healthcare by enabling autonomous reasoning and decision-making for complex medical tasks. As adoption accelerates in the coming years, this technology—building on generative artificial intelligence—will proactively manage multistep processes and synthesize information from diverse sources to enhance efficiency and patient outcomes. Potential applications of agentic AI include drug discovery, clinical trials, insurance claims processing, clinical referrals, diagnosis, and virtual health assistance—such as real-time monitoring and medication reminders.

However, integrating agentic AI into healthcare presents significant challenges, including issues related to data privacy, ethical considerations, transparency, and ensuring safety and reliability in autonomous decision-making. Addressing these challenges will be critical for the responsible deployment of this technology.

This lecture will introduce the concept of agentic AI and explore its prospective applications and challenges. It will also present a vision of how “Human-AI Collaboration” can deliver “Smarter Healthcare.”