AI is becoming a huge influence in the world of healthcare, with the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes. This will be done by AI analyzing immense amounts of medical data and coming to conclusions without direct human aid to improve diagnostics, advance treatments, boost patient engagement, and to support administrative tasks at hand to better improve efficiency in the workplace.
There are actually various subtypes of AI being used in healthcare as we speak. There’s Natural language processing algorithms that are giving machines the ability to comprehend and decipher human language. The techniques used in machine learning are making computers recognize patterns and make prediction based on vast volumes of complex medical data.
Lets dive deeper into the 4 ways how AI can impact healthcare!
Diagnostics
AI technology has the ability to help healthcare professionals to diagnose patients by analyzing any symptoms, treatments personalized by patients, and overall predicting the risk that a patient has towards a certain disease/issue. To help improve patient outcomes, healthcare AI can be used to create algorithms that forcaset individual and community health risk. This has been done at the University of Pennsylvania, where doctors predicted sepsis or septic shock in patients around 12 hours in advance! They did this by using a machine learning algorithm that can track hundreds of important indicators in real time.
Treatment
There have been a number of cases where AI has been helpful in treating patients. A number of researches posted an article on frontiers ( a human neuroscience article organization) explaining how brain -computer interfaces are helping the process of rehabilitation of people with motor/speech impairments.
AI also has the capacity to accelerate the process of drug development. This will lead to reduced time and costs for discovery. By utilizing AI tools for data-driven decision making, researches can identify and prioritize compounds that should be further explored.
Patient Engagement
The utilization of wearables and personalized medical devices, like smartwatches and activity trackers, provides a way for patients and clinicians to monitor health and gather data for population health research. Additionally, these devices may assist in enhancing patient adherence to treatment recommendations, which can have an impact on treatment outcomes. However, noncompliance with prescribed medications or recommended behavioral changes may lead to treatment failure. AI technology can help personalize treatment plans and encourage patients to become more engaged in their care. For example, Livongo is a company that sends personalized health notifications, or “health nudges,” to its users to support both mental and physical health.
Admin Tasks
A study at Mayo Clinic as proven that physicians spend around 34% to 55% of their work day creating notes and reviewing medical records in the electronic health record, which in turn will drop productivity levels. AI has the potential to automate this process for physicians, so that they won’t have to do it at all. For instance, clinical documentation tools that leverage natural language processing can decrease the amount of time clinicians spend on documentation tasks, allowing them to concentrate on delivering high-quality care.
In addition to this, AI can help claims management by creating algorithms that can detect insurance claim issues before insurers do. This will save the insurers’ time, as 80% of claims are flagged incorrect or fraudulent.
I’m hoping that we can get one of our guest speakers to talk more deeply about digital innovation in healthcare. It’s an industry that is really in need of change, but the entrenched interests keep it from happening. I think that’s where BJs hesitancy about digital innovation comes from, he knows that the problems in the industry are so fundamental that it’s hard to innovate.
Hey Agazi, such an interesting topic to blog about this week! Hospitals and going to the doctor kind of scares me so I’m glad I’ve never needed surgery or treatments before. There are many issues with hospital wait times as going to the ER can take several hours before you even see a single doctor. Hopefully, the implementation can not only help with improving healthcare predictions but faster consultation times.
Hi Agazi! I love this topic as the correlation between the healthcare industry and technology is usually not talked about due to ethical and legal concerns. I also really liked how you split your post into the 4 different ways AI can help. The one benefit of AI in the healthcare industry that stuck out to me was AI controlling admin tasks. I never really thought about this, but if AI used NLP to write down notes and file claims faster, it can help hospitals and urgent care get through people faster, therefore helping more people! Your blog post leaves me with the question: Will robots/AI fully replace doctors one day? Although this would be hundreds of years from now, I feel as though it could be highly probable to occur.
Great post! The healthcare industry is one that could see a lot of benefit from advancing technologies. I like the mention of engaged patients, because it is very cool to have a watch that can track certain health metrics and it actually makes you want to keep up with those health metrics a bit more. Id love to see where this could go in the future.
Hi Agazi, nice post! I think it is very interesting how AI can help the healthcare industry, and I was not aware of how it can help with the treatment for patients. I think it’s very cool how AI can help with the production of drugs, potentially decreasing the time and cost for drugs. It will be interesting to see how AI will continue to help the healthcare industry more than it has today. Overall, I really enjoyed reading your post!
Hey Agazi! This was a really great read and felt really relevant to one of the companies the VC firm we’ll be talking about in class today, is investing in! A company called Omaiven Health is already starting to help implement some of the things you discussed like back of office diagnostics or administration-esque work. I’d be interested to see more of what AI could look like on the patient front, like how older generations may feel about that or even tele-health!
Wanted to add a link to their site if interested: https://www.omaivenhealth.com/
Hello Agazi! This was an interesting post to read. I think it’s fascinating how AI technologies will be able to diagnose and treat patients. The healthcare industry is growing and these new technologies will bring change and benefit many individuals.
I am 100% on board with implementing AI within our health care/medical system. For the most part, healthcare, and the study of it, is scientifically proven and isn’t usually debatable. This is especially the case when it comes to severe procedures. Because of this, I can’t see many reasons not to implement AI in these fields, except for the job losses that we might suffer. I appreciated you also bringing in insurance and claim issues, as these two are connected. I also believe that AI should be involved in this as well!
Hey Agazi! I enjoyed reading this post. Seeing that AI technologies can be able to diagnose and treat patients is an amazing thing to experience. However, I do believe that AI in healthcare should be a “backup” for doctors and healthcare workers; we shouldn’t solely rely on AI for healthcare related stuff, but I do also believe that it is a great second-hand tool for healthcare workers to use.
Hey Agazi, I really enjoyed this post! It’s interesting to see how artificial intelligence can be implemented in healthcare. I’ve heard the news about how people believe that AI will assist doctors instead of nurses in the coming future. This may seem a little far-fetched but we have software such as Chatgpt changing the way people gather information, I’m excited for the future.
HI Agazi! I specifically came to yours to read about diagnosis, I think this stage is the most critical in the field. It needs to be modernized, latency is not acceptable in healthcare, and although we’ve come a long way…we have the resources to make it better.
Hi Agazi! This is a very interesting topic. I definitely foresee many ways that healthcare can benefit from AI. I definitely see the potential implementations will help with diagnostics which would be extremely helpful given the amount of false diagnosis’s that are given out now.