Artificial Intelligence (AI) is predicted to play a game-changing role in patient care. Let’s take a small example of its help in medical diagnosis. Imagine a scenario where a patient walks into a doctor’s office with symptoms indicative of several possible illnesses. The doctor, to be sure, consults a digital assistant which scans a global database and comes up with a solution based on deep data analysis. The doctor goes on to prescribe further tests to confirm the prediction, and here too, machine learning helps with comparing the images to the database and confirms the most likely cause of illness. The doctor has just hastened patient care and with the help of accumulated intelligence has diagnosed the case. Not stopping there, the doctor introduces the patient to a chat-bot that explains the disease and its treatment. It schedules follow-up visits as well as any further investigations, if required. AI has just proved how invaluable it can be in patient care, by shortening the diagnosis to treatment curve. Where time is of the essence, AI has proved how invaluable it can be.
Machine learning has brought AI to the forefront of healthcare and it is likely that its impact on diagnosing and treating diseases will be unsurpassed. Recognizing this trend, a 2016 study by Frost & Sullivan, projects AI in healthcare to reach $6.6 billion by 2021, a 40 percent growth rate. The study further confirms that AI will enhance patient care delivery by strengthening the medical imaging diagnosis process. As an industry disrupter, AI will create real value for patients by supporting prevention, diagnosis, treatment, management and drug creation.
Technology experts predict that in the next couple of decades AI will be a standard component of healthcare – augmenting and amplifying human effort. Its role will be as impactful and as quiet as the common X-ray machine. It will also automate several health care tasks that are time-consuming and which require tons of unstructured data to be converted into intelligence.
While some of the innovations that we are talking about are futuristic in nature, AI has already quietly infiltrated this industry. It is already being used by healthcare players to manage billing, appointment fixing, and logistics planning. To move into core clinical areas requires an amassing of data and that too has already begun. With quantifiable data, diagnostics will become accurate and as a result indispensable in medical treatment. Does this mean that we will see robot doctors in the place of human medical professionals? Let’s leave that to science fiction movies for now. What is more likely to happen is AI-enabled medical professionals.
To summarize, we can only imagine AI’s impact on saving human lives, going forward. For example, just imagine people in remote areas with limited access to diagnostics. AI has just helped the local medical professional to remotely prescribe treatment, deliver medicines through an automated delivery system and prescribe telemedicine. In a way, it has just helped to shrink the world.
Technology companies focusing on the healthcare segment are investing in Centers of Excellence where AI empowered healthcare IoT will bring about some dynamic changes, not to mention better control over existing processes such as supply chain, inventory management, equipment management, invoicing and drug development and reduce latency, lower cost and deliver operational efficiency. At Trigent, while we solve the problem of productivity, we remain focused on helping healthcare organizations take care of more people with less resources. We do this by tapping our knowledge, experience and expertise in data and machine learning.
