How Does AI Change The Healthcare?
Artificial Intelligence: a much-needed step towards modernization in healthcare
The healthcare industry has made a lot of breakthroughs and advancements in the last few centuries. Researchers, scientists, and doctors have all played a major role in improving our ability to medically care for one another. However, when it comes to advancements in modernizing our existing healthcare system, progress hasn’t been that great.
The healthcare industry has been quite slow at utilizing technology to improve and streamline aspects such as management and operations. The effects of this slow adoption have been showing for a while, and patients are demanding a better healthcare system. Incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the healthcare industry can address this issue. AI has the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry, allowing us to get faster and better diagnoses on top of lowering costs, among other benefits. In this article, we are going to analyze the impact of AI on the healthcare industry and see how it can change healthcare for the better.
The Role of AI in Making Healthcare Better
When we talk about AI and healthcare, a lot of people immediately start thinking about robotic doctors carrying out complex surgeries on patients. While this is something that we expect to see in the future, there are several other benefits of incorporating AI in the healthcare industry.
Before we discuss the revolutionary effects of AI in healthcare, we have to understand that there’s a lot more to the healthcare industry than practitioners attending to patients. Between every interaction of a practitioner and patient, there are a ton of operations, tasks, and processes that ensure medical practitioners are able to provide the highest level of medical care for each and every patient.
These operations involve administrative tasks, proper diagnosis, financial management, etc. Artificial Intelligence can significantly improve these processes, enabling healthcare organizations to offer better services to patients. Let’s take a look at a few examples of how AI is making healthcare better.
1- Automating Administrative Tasks
Hospitals have a ton of administrative tasks that are essential yet time-consuming. A lot of these tasks, especially the ones revolving around insurance claims and billing, consume a lot of time and resources. This ultimately results in inefficiencies that not only affect patient outcomes but also reduce the overall quality of healthcare in general.
Incorporating AI into healthcare can automate and streamline redundant operational tasks. For instance, AI can help in scheduling appointments, updating patient records, following up on due payments, and processing insurance claims. Aside from this, AI can also help in the general management of healthcare institutes, such as assigning appropriate wards and relevant doctors to patients based on their issues.
2- Analyzing Big Data
Big data plays a substantial role in improving the way healthcare professionals care for the masses. AI is great at processing big data - it can go through millions of data points and map out patterns and relations to help researchers gain new insights. Hospitals and healthcare facilities can benefit from these insights as they help them understand how to streamline their processes and cut down costs on top of highlighting areas that need further improvement. Aside from this, analyzing a new patient’s data in relation to archive data can also help diagnose and treat the patient more effectively.
3- Better Diagnosis & Treatment
AI has the potential to increase both the speed and accuracy of diagnosis, leading to better and more efficient treatment. Recent research at Harvard's School of Public Health shows that utilizing Artificial Intelligence in healthcare can reduce treatment costs by 50% on top of improving health outcomes by 40%. If trained on sufficient data, AI can also diagnose a patient without needing a physician. Furthermore, AI can also recommend proper medication based on the diagnosed condition and its severity. Above all, AI can be used to collect and process health-related data from wearable devices like smartwatches to properly diagnose a condition and even give warnings to the patient.
A Better Tomorrow for the Healthcare Industry
AI thrives when it is paired with existing technology. It has the ability to supercharge analytics, automate redundant tasks, and speed up processes while cutting back on costs. Coincidentally, these three advantages of AI are exactly what the healthcare industry has been in need of for quite some time.
We are already getting a glimpse of how AI can change the healthcare industry for the better. The RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamic Research recently figured out how to utilize stem cells to grow usable retina layers. This feat was possible thanks to the 200 million scenarios that were evaluated using AI. Processing data of this scale would be next to impossible without AI assistance. All in all, AI technology is set to play a major role in modernizing healthcare in the coming future. It has the potential to completely revolutionize the healthcare system from basic administrative tasks to complex surgeries.