Seth Rainford is the president and co-founder of Digital Diagnostics, a pioneering AI diagnostics company.
It’s hard to read anything online without running into all of the advancements that are being made in artificial intelligence (AI). That said, the transformative power of AI within the healthcare industry can’t be overstated—and it shouldn’t be underestimated either.
Over the last decade or so, the role of AI in healthcare has grown considerably, powering software used by healthcare organizations, as well as wearable tech and sensors used by patients. In the last few years, we have seen the technology advance by orders of magnitude we couldn’t have reasonably expected, especially when it comes to patient-centric healthcare.
AI improves access to care.
One of the biggest impacts of AI in healthcare is improved access to care for many people, such as those who live in rural or underserved areas without many medical professionals or specialists in close proximity.
We all witnessed telemedicine experience recent growth and attention, and while some of that has leveled off, it’s clear that virtual healthcare services can provide value to patients who otherwise could not physically attend appointments.
Similarly, AI-driven solutions (e.g., chatbots) are now being used as virtual assistants to help schedule appointments for patients, provide next-step guidance or even offer basic healthcare information. This can help free up certain medical staff and allow them to focus on other patient-centric priorities and care for more patients at a time.
Different types of AI can address various issues.
An area of particular interest to me is the development of assistive and autonomous AI technologies and the different ways they are being used to increase access to care for patients.
Assistive AI typically involves the technology completing a task that provides the medical professional with additional information or analysis that can be used to make the diagnosis or treatment decision. Assistive AI can be particularly useful for certain actions, such as evaluating large datasets, taking measurements or analyzing medical images. In essence, assistive AI can act like a second set of eyes for the clinician, providing support to offload certain tasks and mental drain or super-powering back-office functions.
Autonomous AI, on the other hand, involves the technology completing the task as well as making the decision, such as providing a medical diagnosis, without the need for human interpretation of the data. For example, my company uses autonomous AI in our solution that diagnoses diabetic retinopathy.
Professionals can leverage AI for a proactive approach to healthcare.
AI not only helps to increase the number of patients medical professionals can care for at one time, it also has the ability in some cases to make healthcare more proactive.
Detecting diseases in their earliest stages rather than waiting for irreversible damage is a huge step in the right direction. Supporting doctors in providing treatment earlier could lead to better patient outcomes in addition to lowering costs for patients and providers, while freeing up the healthcare system to take on additional patients.
Using a large amount of data, such as medical images, medical history, patient records, genetic information and lifestyle data (among other things), professionals can use AI to build early detection algorithms and risk prediction models. Working with vast quantities of such data, however, requires rigorous validation as well as an ethically founded approach to AI design and clearance.
A proactive approach to healthcare doesn’t need to be limited to a doctor’s office. Today, there are many ways patients—really consumers at this stage—can take charge of their own healthcare journey by using AI. Wearable devices, powered by AI, like the Apple Watch or Fitbit, can monitor for abnormalities that may lead to a diagnosis of various health issues.
The right way isn’t always the easy way.
If you’ve read about AI in healthcare recently, you know that AI still has a long way to go. As a whole, we’ve made incredible progress with this technology, but it is still far from perfect. Every day there are news articles regarding bias in AI algorithms—and in healthcare, this can have a very real impact on patient outcomes and patients’ lives.
Take the documentary Coded Bias, released in 2020, which covers the flaws found in facial recognition technology that may lead to racial bias. Mistakes made using AI can have a negative impact on the lives of many people. This kind of bias is often what happens when AI is trained on a very narrow data set, or when shortcuts are taken.
That said, there are plenty of organizations that are committed to an ethical and equitable solution, where the focus is on patient safety and improved outcomes for everyone. What this requires is training on a vast data set with a stringent validation process and identifying and removing bias from conceptualization through design and implementation. Finally, we should prioritize validating the technology in real-world settings to make sure it works equally well for all people in all care settings; this is paramount to success and adoption.
We need to find the right balance of AI and human.
Healthcare isn’t going to look the same in coming years. AI will have a transformative impact on how medical professionals care for patients and how they operate within their organizations.
AI will not replace providers and caregivers. Rather it will complement what they already do and provide them with additional resources in order to care for more patients and reach some who they would otherwise not have been able to treat.
Reducing physician burnout, time to diagnosis (and subsequent treatment) and healthcare costs while increasing access and quality are only the tip of the iceberg. There is much more change on the way with the role AI will play in healthcare. Some have said that AI will be “as big as the invention of the internet.” While still in early innings, it’s hard to refute the immense impact AI could ultimately have on all of our lives.
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