Artificial intelligence (AI) has already altered our world in many significant ways, from targeted advertisements and personal home assistants to cybersecurity. The future promises even greater impacts, and health care is no exception.
Source: metamorworks / Shutterstock
Healthcare spending in the United States accounts for trillions of dollars per year and nearly 20% of our gross domestic product. So, it makes sense to take advantage of tools that can increase the efficiency of such a substantial part of our economy.
A task force set up by Connected Health recently published a report titled “Policy Principles for Artificial Intelligence in Health,” which discusses and makes recommendations on the use of AI in health care.
We’ll discuss the recommendations in a later post, but first, we’ll look at the current uses and benefits of AI in this industry.
Medical Records
“Every two years, the amount of available data in the world doubles,” says D/SRUPTION Senior Staff Writer Laura Cox in an article on AI in health care. “Medical professionals need high quality administrative organisation to make sense of mass datasets.” Therefore, AI is a great tool for managing and processing this massive amount of information.
Clinical Decision-Making
Companies like IBM have developed medical algorithms with analytical reasoning capabilities that can use existing data to provide practitioners with additional clinical knowledge.
AI-Powered Health Assistants
The healthcare industry has its own version of Alexa and Siri—Catalia Health’s Mabu, which is built on a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant system located in the cloud and can provide real-time data about the patients it interacts with.
Precision Medicine
AI can be used to assist in the development and prescription of medications by looking at genomic factors, for example.
Clinical Trials Procedure
“Traditional clinical trials are slow and expensive, taking years to complete and often failing due to participant fall out,” says Cox. “This is largely because of legacy processes that make it difficult both for clinics and the people they invite to join the trials. However, there are various ways that AI can improve clinical trials, from matching potential participants with relevant trials to finding meaning in test results.”
AI has the potential to revolutionize many industries, and the size, complexity, and importance of the healthcare industry make it a great field in which to deploy these technologies.
In two follow-up posts, we’ll discuss some of the recommendations in the Connected Health report for possible uses of AI in health care.