Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the landscapes of many industries, healthcare in particular. Here are five ways AI is changing healthcare.
1. More Efficient Operations
There are many ways you can incorporate AI in healthcare practices. One of the most common and easiest is to install programs that assist in operations at your hospital or clinic. Because of how tightly interwoven and variable the various systems of hospital management can become, it can be difficult for staff to keep up with the complexities of day-to-day decision-making. Patients may cancel appointments or experience an unexpected complication. Doctors and nurses need to be able to switch from one case to another at a moment’s notice. Even janitorial and cafeteria operations need to be managed seamlessly. AI can help staff monitor daily operations more closely and alert the relevant parties if something needs immediate attention.
2. Assistive Clinical Technology
While it’s always best for a healthcare provider to be the one diagnosing a patient, AI can be a useful assistive tool for clinicians. Using it, a doctor or nurse can look up patients’ symptoms and connect them to various potential illnesses more quickly and make more accurate diagnoses. The data AI programs can collect and store also helps doctors prescribe more accurate and beneficial treatment regimens for their patients. The speed and efficiency of assistive AI in clinical settings can help diagnose patients sooner, which typically results in more positive prognoses.
3. Robotics
Robotics is an increasingly important field in the medical industry. In the operating room, robots can assist surgeons in precise, accurate and efficient ways. A surgeon isn’t going to leave the whole operation to the robot, but the robot can work more steadily and for longer periods of time than a surgeon, which leads to more positive patient outcomes, particularly in higher-risk surgeries. Bots can also assist patients in scheduling appointments and retrieving relevant medical information. They may also be able to assist nurses in other parts of the hospital, monitoring the health of post-procedure patients and quickly alerting nurses of changes in patient status.
4. Electronic Health Records
One of the most common uses of AI is in collecting, storing and analyzing data. In medical practices, the majority of data is patient data, which doctors need to access in order to learn about a patient’s medical history and extrapolate potential diagnoses and treatment plans. Patients may also need to access their medical histories. With AI-augmented databases and electronic health records, accessing and interpreting patient data becomes far easier for healthcare providers and patients to do. You can also leverage AI to automate the processes of record-taking and record-keeping. AI algorithms can auto-fill parts of patients’ charts for doctors so they can focus on interacting with their patients. AI can also be used as voice-recognition software so the doctor can dictate notes quickly instead of needing to pause and write his or her notes down.
5. Precision Medicine
Precision medicine is a term for a new approach to preventive medicine. It takes genetic factors, lifestyle and a patient’s current and former environments into account. By accounting for these factors, a doctor may be able to get a more accurate idea of what is causing a patient’s complaint. It may also be much easier to prevent certain conditions, such as breast cancer, by monitoring a patient with a known genetic risk factor. AI is ideally suited to assist in precision medicine. AI algorithms can process and analyze patient information much more quickly than humans, and so can predict a patient’s long-term risk for certain diseases much more quickly and accurately.
Healthcare benefits immensely from various scientific and technological breakthroughs. As AI grows more advanced and ubiquitous, it will continue to leave its mark on healthcare just like many other advances in medical technology.
