AI in Healthcare: Enormous Opportunities

Artificial intelligence is transforming various industries and the impact of AI in Healthcare to be truly life changing. Already, it has been used to detect diseases and is helping to make better health decisions.

According to research, investment in AI in healthcare expected to reach $6.6 billion by 2021. And according to Accenture, “The top AI applications may result in annual savings of $150 billion by 2026”. Discussing on the same line, Arush Sogani, Director, Sysnet Global Technologies said, “Healthcare is a process-oriented industry that offers an enormous opportunity to use AI to drive improvements, help meet unmet demand, and automate repetitive tasks. This is seen across R&D, patient care, medical imaging, and management tasks”.

The focus of Artificial intelligence is more on empowering physicians rather than replacing them.

Looking at the medical AI ecosystem, we can see that much of the work is going on in Prediction and prevention, wellness, ageing, rehabilitation and technological augmentation of doctors.

Arush shared some use cases of AI, “An interesting trend we can see in the healthcare industry is the entry of digital technology with an intent to transform the industry with mining medical records to provide better and faster health services.

The top AI use cases in healthcare –

• Robot-assisted surgery: These techniques can help analyze data from pre-operation medical records, physically guide instruments in real-time during a procedure, use data from actual surgical experiences to inform new surgical techniques. Expected outcome is to reduce errors and reduce patients’ length of post-surgery stay.

• Virtual nurse assistance: Voice and text apps trained to ask and handle preliminary health related questions. This enables wellness checks via voice and AI, reduces unnecessary hospital visits, assesses symptoms, and directs patients to the most effective care setting. The goal of these apps is to reduce the time nurses spend on patient maintenance.

• Diagnostics: Applying cognition to unlock vast amounts of health records, AI offers tremendous value in recognizing patterns across millions of scans in a short time with high accuracies. Areas of radiology and cancer research are prime targets.

• Administration: Non-patient activities consume an enormous amount of time for medical personnel. Use of voice-to-text apps to cut documentation time, improve quality reporting, and analyze thousands of medical papers using NLP to inform treatment plans saves time, increases patient care, and reduces inefficiencies.

AI and ML are also helping in medical imaging, Drug discovery, Medication management and robotic surgery.