Health care has surely been transformed in recent years and thanks to artificial intelligence that it is in the right direction. With the advancement of machinery, the healthcare industry has become prevalent but before one could peep into how artificial intelligence has changed the medical industry, it is important to know what actually artificial intelligence is?
Many believe that artificial intelligence is using machines to perform day-to-day tasks. Surely, it is the use of smart technologies and advanced machinery, but it adds an additional ability of human intelligence into it. It enables us to complete a task just like a human mind with the help of smart technology. This helps add features of problem-solving and natural language processing.
It is quite interesting to know how artificial intelligence has changed the working of several industries such as the health care sector. It makes every minute process and function of the sector smarter and provides a simulation of human intelligence with the help of machinery.
How has AI caused a paradigm shift in the field of healthcare?
The health care sector is one of the major sectors in most economies. Situations such as pandemics often challenge such sectors. In such situations, providing artificial intelligence support to the industry can actually help it maintain productivity and efficiency for each activity done on a particular day.
These days, consumers expect hospitals to be smarter. When it is about patient experiences and health care services, no one wishes to compromise with what they are getting. In such an era, technologies can provide real help. AI does not only help bring productivity to daily care services but also helps improve the overall experiences of patients.
There are several areas of the health care sector where automation of AI helps:
- Improving competitive positioning of hospitals
- Ensuring profitable growth
- Perfect engagement of consumers and doctors
- Providing personalized customer experiences
- Easy control over hospital staff and their remunerations
- Track over patients & their records.
- Enhancement of medical treatments
What is AI? An overview
Everyone is well aware of the advantages of using technologies and machinery in our day-to-day life. When smart machinery is used for performing a task with a simulation of the human mind, this can be termed ‘artificial intelligence’ or AI.
In recent years, the advancement of AI has made it common in most sectors around the world. AI enables computers and other machinery to perform smart tasks in an easy and efficient manner. It describes different techniques that work on concepts defined by human reasoning such as problem-solving skills.
Recent AI machinery has been evolving each day. Prior machinery working with AI used to work on explicit programming as defined by human beings, these days, machinery is smart enough to learn from examples and start working accordingly for day-to-day tasks.
AI and healthcare sectors
When AI is used in sectors such as health care, it helps define tasks and operations in a smart way. It has been years since AI has been used in the development of health care machinery. Such machinery performs even the general task in the smartest way out.
AI systems now have efficient machine learning capabilities. This lets them maintain a smart data-driven clinical design support for keeping patient records and their treatment history in a well-planned manner. It enables doctors and health care staff to keep a smart track of all the day-to-day functions happening in a hospital.
When AI is used in healthcare, it includes a capability of deep learning because AI is all about the identification of patterns, using algorithms to perform tasks in a time-consuming and smart manner, and providing an automated insight into each healthcare process. All this does not only reduce the involvement of labour, but also helps in ensuring increased revenue for the hospitals.
Implementation of AI in healthcare sectors
In order to ensure maximum efficiency with artificial intelligence, it is important to ensure proper implementation of AI practices in day to day processes of the medical sector. AI enables enhanced productivity and machine learning facilities and thus speeds up the process by increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
So as to ensure better efficiency with AI, it is important to ensure the following:
- Automation of administrative tasks
There are high-volume administrative tasks conducted in each department of the health organization. In order to achieve proper processing of workflow, it is essential to implement AI. - Enhancement of customer experience
Hospitals must focus on providing virtual healthcare services because this is the need of the day. In order to achieve a better customer experience, the implementation of AI in customer services is essential for hospitals. - Integration of AI in electronic health records
Every hospital has huge data to store and by the implementation of AI in this segment, it is easy to track and monitor patients’ data in order to provide the best treatment.
Benefits of AI in Healthcare & Medicine
Technology has already been serving as a best friend for humans for ages. The introduction of artificial intelligence in the healthcare sector has contributed a multitude of benefits for this sector. By providing automation in all the processes of health professionals, it has provided a nice way to track and monitor patients and provide the best services to them.
The Healthcare sector is a crucial sector in all economies. The failure of such industries can damage the overall population and may lead to severe conditions. In an era of pandemics and serious diseases running around the globe, this sector needs to be highly capable of providing the best services to its consumers.
Artificial intelligence helps provide the best facilities at a lower cost. While healthcare involves numerous tasks, it is hard to manage it only through human force. Automation is key to improving such sectors and AI provides better capabilities.
From keeping a track of patients, AI can handle electronic data, follow-up unpaid bills, helps reduce the workload of professionals, save additional money, track patients’ past records, identify deep health issues, provide the best possible treatments, etc.
AI – The future of healthcare and medicine
In recent years, the evolution of some wonderful medications has increased the probability of life-saving opportunities. There are medications that claim to cure even the most serious illnesses such as cancer and other chronic diseases. The medical industry is changing and this has led to increasing expectations of patients from their hospitals.
When machines and their advancements are introduced in the healthcare industry, it opens up endless opportunities to use technology to conduct different operations and processes in a smart, precise, and efficient manner. Further, it can contribute to risk assessment of a particular illness so that providing treatment can be facilitated with an impactful intervention at the right moment for ensuring the best patient care.
AI can offer the ability of smart learning algorithms that can add advantages to clinical decision-making techniques to perform diagnosis and care processes in a precise and accurate way. It helps maintain smart data for patients that enable a structure to monitor and maintain voluminous data about the patients.
There are several ways in which AI will revolutionize the healthcare sector and these are:
- Unifying mind and machinery using brain-computer interfaces
Computers and machinery have long been used in many sectors, but with the help of AI, it is possible to create a smart interface between technology and the human mind. When AI is used in health care applications, it provides a cutting-edge specification for research and treatment.
Using AI in neurological diseases and trauma, it is possible to detect the issues at the right time and provide the best treatment in such cases. Smart machinery offers brain-computer interfaces that could directly connect with the brain to improve their medical condition. This could help reduce the extreme effects of such diseases as loss of speech or loss of movement.
- Development of smart radiology tools
Most doctors trust reports of MRI machines, CT scanners, and X-rays. Such machines offer a visualization report of the inner functions of a human body. This is a smart diagnostic process that can be relied on for several outcomes, however; many believe these machines offer non-invasive visibility. Doctors often trust physical tissue samples or biopsies reports.
Through tissue, medical examination and biopsies offer the most precise samples to study the condition of an individual patient they create an unidentified risk of infections. Artificial intelligence is thus set to introduce the concept of virtual biopsies that could peep into tumours’ genetic properties and other types of cancers.
- Providing technological support in developing areas
There is the easy availability of radiologists, but such segments often lack in other health care executives such as ultrasound technicians. This shortage reduces the overall efficiency of radiologists. Artificial intelligence can impact the needs of the clinical staff because radiologists can then be able to use technology to perform additional tasks.
When AI will be introduced to imaging tools, it could enable x-ray machines to detect even the early signs of diseases such as tuberculosis with high accuracy so that treatment can be availed at the right time.
- AI in clinical documentation processes
Computers have been long used to maintain patient records in healthcare organizations and hospitals, but those digital records have slowly started to create issues. Electronic health records are already flooded with patients’ information and sometimes it is hard for clinical staff to keep track of it.
This cognitive information overload, user burnout, and endless documentation made it quite essential to introduce AI for managing electronic health records. This can help create a focus on three essential tasks of information and these are maintaining perfect clinical documentation, easy entry of patient information, and sorting of information in a well-managed manner.
- Identification of the antibiotic resistance risks
Overdose of certain medications may cause superbugs to evolve. When certain critical drugs are given to individuals, their bodies may stop responding to such drugs. It is thus important to monitor the patients on such medications.
Introducing artificial intelligence can help keep track of such patients so that the right drug pattern can be suggested to such patients as soon as they develop any symptoms of antibiotic resistance.
- Introducing intelligence to machinery and medical devices
For monitoring critical patients, advanced mechanisms and improved instruments are essentials. The introduction of artificial intelligence may help develop smart devices. The aggregation of such devices monitors patients and provides the right treatment even when they are in critical conditions.
Using smart devices, it is possible to reduce complications in patients and ensure improved outcomes. The introduction of intelligence to smart devices can also help monitor patients admitted to ICU even when they are not in a stage to respond properly.
- Advancement of procedures like immunotherapy for cancer patients
Treatment such as chemotherapy and immunotherapy is effective to treat patients with cancer. Cancer is a serious illness that creates a risk of life for many patients. However, in recent years, effective medical treatment is successful to treat cancer patients in the early stages, but the evolution of effective treatments is still awaited.
With artificial intelligence, it would be easy to collect data of past patients to ensure better treatment for them. The introduction of machine learning algorithms in immunotherapy could help act right on the genetic functions of patients and thus help provide precise treatment for cancer patients.
- Using health records for prediction of risk
Computers have long been used to manage and maintain the health records of patients. Electronic health records have wide data of past patients and their related treatments. Even when they have precise information about patients, it is sometimes difficult to extract reliable data from it. Artificial intelligence helps extract reliable, accurate, and timely data for analysis and clinic decisions.
There are algorithms in AI that could help retrieve just the required information in order to predict the risk of certain diseases and treatments. EHR analytics can help depict diseases at the right time and can also suggest which medication will be effective for such issues.
- Predicting health issues with smart and wearable devices
In recent years, AI has been successful in introducing effective medical devices that could collect the health information of a patient. There is software that could detect heartbeats right on smartphones. Instruments of blood pressure, oxygen level, and fever tracking devices have long been used in each home now.
When artificial intelligence works with such devices, it is easy to extract meaningful data so as to conduct actionable insight about health and treatment in humans. With such smart devices, it is no longer required to visit the clinic for basic health checkups because this can be done right at home in easy steps.
People love taking selfies but now these selfies can be used as an important input for clinical imaging. With huge populations, it is hard to conduct individual imaging for every patient and in such cases, such photographs from smart devices could act as a medical input.
The earlier and most basic example is dermatology and ophthalmology. There are algorithms supported by AI that could provide attributes for the detection of features such as a child’s jawline, eye placement and nose placement etc.
AI – A primer for clinician
Healthcare sectors have been using the software since the 1970s. Used in several day-to-day processes, these smart devices help keep track of patients that visit clinics or hospitals each year. With advancements in techniques and medical facilities, it is important to bring in essential changes to the use of technologies.
It has been years when old-fashioned, human-designed logic and rules were used in healthcare software. Now, the healthcare industry has evolved and thus it becomes quite essential to bring in the latest changes to techniques used in healthcare industries.
In recent years, technological development has already changed the healthcare sector. Artificial intelligence has successfully contributed to providing advanced approaches to machine learning and artificial neural networks in the medical sector. In such a world, medical software and other healthcare devices no longer rely on logical rules defined by humans. They learn with examples and change with their experiences to provide the best outcomes.
In Conclusion
Technological advancement comes with its own set of drawbacks and the main aim of healthcare executives and experts is to implement effective AI strategies so as to attain the best and perfect results. AI is surely delivering multiple benefits to health sectors and it is essential for professionals to shape the future of the sector with the potential benefits of artificial intelligence.
For managing the health sector appropriately, the introduction of automation is essential and AI can help in this aspect. Surely, AI is a cost-effective step that can help nurture health sectors in the right direction. Introducing AI can enable better health services with cost efficiency, better patient satisfaction, enhanced patient and professional engagements, insight for medical treatments, easy organizational management, and overall enhancement of hospitals and clinics.
