The technology is advancing very fast. Organizations have to derive advantages of new technologies by adopting and integrating them into their business processes. Healthcare industry seems to be moving in a right direction by adopting artificial intelligence technology. The reason behind adopting AI technology is to provide an accurate and quality healthcare to patients.
According to a recent study of forbes.com, artificial intelligence investment in healthcare is expected to reach $6.6 billion by 2021. Further, Accenture predicts that AI applications in the healthcare industry could save $150 billion annually by 2026.
In this article, we’ll look at 5 ways artificial intelligence could affect healthcare in the near future:
Now-a-days, most of us use search engines like Google or healthcare portals like WebMD – to know about a certain illness or causes of illness by searching symptoms online. While the results are search seems to address our quest to know about the cause of illness, nevertheless, the results of the search may not be accurate for individuals. Instead of looking for causes in the search engines, Artificial Intelligence technology could help us in better understanding the causes of illness through conversations with what are being called as Virtual Nurse Assistants.. Apart from facilitating an understanding of causes of illness for given symptoms, these assistants can also schedule appointments with the concerned doctors or ERs if needed.
According to the recent study conducted by marketsandmarkets.com, healthcare virtual assistants market is projected to reach USD 1,729 million by 2024 from USD 391 million in 2019, at a CAGR of 34.6%.
AI-powered virtual assistants are very well-trained from the millions of real case files to ask the patients relevant questions. Natural Language Processing technology is being continually improved by understanding complicated sentences and responding to natural conversations. This advanced technology improvement helps the healthcare industry in providing quality patient care.
Virtual nurse assistant benefits:
- Virtual nurse assistants could be the first point of contact and could fill the void in those scenarios where there is a shortage of physical RNs
- Virtual nurse assistants are available 24*7 for patient care
- Virtual nurse assistants can educate low health literacy patients with guided instructions
- Virtual nurse assistants act in a friendly way with the patients by asking questions on symptoms and causes of illness
- Virtual nurse assistants can help the patients in identifying symptoms for the illness and also schedule the appointment with concerned doctors
- Virtual nurse assistants can send notifications to patients to remind them of upcoming doctor appointments
- Virtual nurse assistants can facilitate general medical education like providing CPR instructions etc..
- Virtual nurse assistants can also educate the patients on the usage of a drug from time to time
In the healthcare industry, a radiologist decision plays a main role in providing medical treatment to patients. With lifestyle changes and after that proliferation of new diseases, there is a felt need for more radiologists to infer diseases from the lab reports. Moreover, training more radiologists within a short period is also challenging for the healthcare industry. In these cases, Artificial Intelligence technology can help the healthcare industry in efficiently and effectively providing radiology/ image analysis.
Radiology is the most suitable area to adopt Artificial Intelligence. Radiology consists of image reports like X-rays, CT scans, etc. The radiologists spend more time analyzing radiology images. Artificial Intelligence can reduce the waiting time for getting accurate radiology reports. Artificial Intelligence can analyze the radiology images using Machine learning models with super speed and accuracy.
AI in radiology benefits:
- Improve the radiology image analysis productivity accurately
- It helps in lowering the risk of delaying radiology image reports
- It helps the doctors to take medical decisions accurately by allowing them to access the radiology reports easily
Pathologists are analyzing the images and provide diagnostic data to healthcare providers. Healthcare providers start most of the treatment based on the pathology reports. Pathologists are used to identifying thousands of tissue slides to find abnormalities in patient samples. It is very time-consuming and pathologists must analyse the images meticulously. Pathologists scan the slide with the help of imaging software. The digitized slide images with high resolution are used by the pathologist to identify the cancerous cells and mark them. Machine Learning applications can capture this information and preciously identify more cancerous cells.
The digitized slide image analysis can generate tremendous data. By using this data, AI and machine learning applications can be trained meticulously, provide useful insights and predictions to the pathologists.
The machine learning applications can help pathologists in judging patient diseases faster. In the near future, pathologists may work with software labs instead of traditional microscopes. Moreover, pathologists can focus more time on diagnosis and make accurate decisions from insights provided by machine learning applications.
AI in pathology benefits:
- The image slide analysis is becoming faster with AI and machine learning applications
- The patients no need to wait for a longer time for the pathology reports and diagnoses
- AI technology is more efficient for analyzing cancer image slides and providing accurate insights
AI for personalized medicine to diagnose diseases faster
Artificial intelligence in personalized medicine is a novel approach and it
can help the healthcare industry in providing quality healthcare, thereby maximizing the lifetime value of patients.
Personalized medicine is prepared based on individual patient historical data, risk factors, and genetics. AI in personalized medicine is more effective because it analyses individual personal data more effectively and suggests the correct diagnosis.
AI for healthcare data security
Securing healthcare data is the most important factor in the healthcare industry to ensure the privacy of the patient as mandated by law. For example, HIPAA Compliance in the U.S. AI helps in securing healthcare data by analyzing, defend against, and respond to suspicious cyber attacks.
Artificial Intelligence seems to be the most preferable solution for the healthcare industry. With the help of the AI, the healthcare industry can provide quality and valuable patient care as described in the above 5 ways that Artificial Intelligence Could Effect Healthcare in the Near Future.