Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the hottest buzzword in the technology industry. It has made waves in every industry, from financial services, shipping, and retail to advertising, logistics, and transportation. Healthcare is not an exception. The market for AI in healthcare is expected to grow to about $60 billion by 2027, with over 500 algorithms already developed across the globe. AI has shown enormous potential to transform diagnoses, treatments, patient care, and even medical research and administration.
Let’s take a deep dive into the impact of AI in the healthcare industry.
Medical Administration
Hospitals are organizations that have a number of activities happening at any given time. From patient admissions, outpatient treatments, and appointment management, to surgeries, inventory oversight, and supply chain operations, hospitals are an ecosystem onto themselves. While patients can only see the clinical side of things, the administrative background is what actually keeps things running.
Artificial intelligence has the power to gear up every administrative activity at hospitals and streamline workflows. Custom tools powered by AI can automate parts of every activity, increasing the speed and accuracy of operations. The hospital staff would be able to handle a far greater workload without additional effort and still have time and energy left to serve patients. It would be a win-win for the healthcare providers, administrative staff, and the patients.
Clinical Decision Support
Doctors routinely make clinical decisions regarding treatments. These are done after analyzing patients’ medical information garnered from various tests and scans. However, AI-powered systems can process a vast amount of patient information and highlight important patterns. These patterns offer actionable insights into patient health and inform medical teams about patient risks or how patients are responding to treatments, drug reactions, and other patterns of diseases.
Artificial intelligence-driven systems can make assessments with extremely high accuracy. Since they need little to no human intervention, the chances for errors tend to be very low. In other words, the insights drawn from AI systems can empower healthcare providers to make better clinical decisions, which directly translate into improved patient care.
Robotic Surgeries
Surgical robots powered by artificial intelligence can perform surgery with unparalleled precision, stability, and consistency. At the same time, this notion might seem like something from a science fiction movie; such robots have already been deployed in real life. The University of Tokyo has implemented AI-powered robots to assist surgeons with intricate procedures. Such devices can ensure total precision throughout the process without the fear of errors.
Robotic surgery has been hailed as a great way to lower the risks involved in surgeries involving tiny blood vessels and delicate tissues. Since robots won’t suffer from even minute tremors, they can bolster the success rate of such surgeries significantly.
Prevention of Insurance Fraud
Insurance fraud is one of the biggest problems facing the healthcare industry in the United States. These frauds include ambiguous claims, billing for services not provided, submission of false patient data, and so on. Studies estimate that such fraudulent activities cost the industry tens of billions of dollars every year.
Artificial intelligence-based fraud detection software can analyze vast amounts of claim data accurately. It can then identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate suspicious activity and highlight them for manual adjudication. Since these systems are mostly automated, they can work extremely fast and discern useful insights to help insurance companies prevent fraud. This can save several billion dollars of losses every year.
Predictive Analysis
Another promising application of artificial intelligence in health insurance is predictive analysis. Insurance companies decide the premiums for each patient based on his or her condition. They do this by calculating the risk factor, which, in simple terms, is the likelihood of a person needing medical care. Patients deemed high-risk are charged higher premiums to help insurers cover their risks.
Artificial intelligence-based systems can process the entire medical history of every patient and calculate their risk accurately. This allows insurance companies to adjust their premiums precisely to avoid over-coverage as well as under-coverage.
Precision Medicine
Precision medicine is a novel concept that can deliver tailored medical treatments to patients based on their constitution. Factors like genetic predisposition, allergies, rare diseases, and adverse reactions impact the effectiveness of treatments. However, precision medicine has the potential to identify all of these factors and help medical teams deliver specific treatments according to each patient’s condition.
AI-based healthcare analytics software can process each patient’s medical history and background to identify individual traits. These can then enable healthcare providers to adjust their treatments and improve the clinical outcomes for patients significantly.
Here’s a table that outlines how Generative AI is being used in healthcare, along with specific examples:
| Application Area | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Medical Imaging | Enhancing and interpreting medical images for better diagnosis and treatment planning. | – Generative AI algorithms generating high-resolution images from low-quality scans. Detecting anomalies in X-rays and MRIs. |
| Drug Discovery | Accelerating the process of discovering new drugs by simulating chemical interactions and predicting outcomes. | – Generating potential drug candidates for diseases like Alzheimer’s.- Simulating the effects of new drugs. |
| Personalized Medicine | Creating tailored treatment plans based on individual patient data and genetic information. | – Designing personalized cancer treatment protocols.- Predicting patient responses to specific medications. |
| Virtual Health Assistants | Providing real-time assistance to patients and healthcare providers through AI-driven chatbots and tools. | – AI chatbots answering patient queries.- Virtual assistants helping doctors with administrative tasks. |
| Clinical Trials | Enhancing the design and recruitment process of clinical trials to improve efficiency and outcomes. | – Generating synthetic patient data for trials. – Predicting trial outcomes and patient adherence rates. |
| Genomic Data Analysis | Analyzing large datasets of genomic information to identify patterns and insights. | – Identifying genetic markers for diseases. – Generating insights from genomic sequences for personalized treatment. |
| Patient Monitoring | Continuously monitoring patient health through wearable devices and AI algorithms. | – Generating alerts for abnormal health metrics. – Predicting potential health issues before they become critical. |
| Radiology | Assisting radiologists by generating detailed reports and highlighting areas of concern in scans. | – AI tools generating preliminary radiology reports. – Enhancing MRI and CT scan interpretations. |
| Healthcare Administration | Optimizing administrative processes to reduce costs and improve efficiency. | – Automating scheduling and billing processes. – Generating optimized staff schedules. |
| Mental Health | Providing support and interventions through AI-driven applications. | – Generating personalized therapy plans. – AI chatbots offering mental health support and monitoring. |
Challenges and Limitations of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
While artificial intelligence has numerous applications in the healthcare industry, it is not without its own set of problems. Algorithms that power the AI systems are only as good as the programmers that develop them. Their own inherent biases, opinions, and limited experience can sometimes find their way into the systems. These then manifest as systemic biases and may result in undesirable outcomes for patients.
A prominent example of biases and personal inhibitions resulting in varying patient outcomes is inequalities based on race. Limited knowledge about the medical needs of different ethnic groups and minorities may result in lower insurance coverage for them. This results in limited access to care, which perpetuates race-based inequity.
Another risk of adopting AI into healthcare systems is regarding data privacy. AI systems analyze patient data sourced from multiple locations. This may increase the risk of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) being viewed by unauthorized individuals. Such a scenario poses serious risks to compliance. However, many experts are confident about avoiding any risk to data privacy through the use of appropriate protocols.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
- Better Diagnoses: AI can look at medical images, like X-rays and MRIs, and spot problems that might be missed by human eyes. This means quicker and more accurate diagnoses.
- Personalized Treatment: AI can analyze a patient’s medical history and genetic information to suggest the best treatments. This helps doctors create customized treatment plans for each patient.
- Drug Discovery: Finding new medicines is a long and expensive process. AI speeds this up by predicting which drug formulas will work, saving time and money.
- Virtual Health Assistants: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can answer patient questions, schedule appointments, and even remind patients to take their medications.
- Remote Monitoring: Wearable devices can track a patient’s vital signs and send this data to AI systems. If something unusual is detected, doctors are alerted immediately.
- Streamlining Administration: AI helps with administrative tasks like scheduling, billing, and managing patient records. This reduces the workload on healthcare staff and allows them to focus more on patient care.
Examples in Action
- Medical Imaging: AI systems can detect early signs of diseases like cancer in medical images, improving chances of successful treatment.
- Chatbots: Virtual assistants like Ada and Woebot provide mental health support, answering questions and offering guidance to users.
- Predictive Analysis: AI predicts which patients are at risk of certain conditions, allowing for early intervention and prevention.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence applications run the gamut of healthcare operations, from administrative tasks to clinical operations. As both hardware and software technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see more innovative applications of AI in the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers must partner with tech innovators and strategize on integrating AI effectively to remain competitive and provide unparalleled patient care in the future.
