Healthcare Digital Transformation
The recent report from the CB Insights states that “the global pandemic has exposed inefficiencies in the current healthcare system highlighting the necessity of finding alternative solutions when resources fall short, or doctor visits become a problem.”
Digitizing systems saw a sudden acceleration when the healthcare providers started looking out for ways to access and manage a surge of patient data. The COVID-19 has shaken the healthcare industry up that has been resistant to reinvention until then. Venture capitalists seized the moment by delivering a record level of funding to medical-related start-ups ranging from telemedicine to AI healthcare in 2020. The healthcare start-ups raised $80.6 billion in 2020, whereas start-ups that leveraged AI healthcare raised $2.3 billion in Q4 2020 and are expected to reach $28 billion by 2025.
AI Healthcare is Gaining Momentum
Microsoft’s recent $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance, a company that delivers speech recognition and conversational AI services, can better explain the current scenario. According to the recent American Medical Association study, more than 50% of physicians spend two hours on administrative work for every hour of daily patient care. That impacts the patient experience as they are kept waiting, and when they are seen, the physician often talks and types at the same time. Hindering communications and lack of focus make patients lose their trust. A good patient experience includes everything from
- Timely appointments
- Friendly interactions with staff without hurry and
- Good communication with the provider
The right healthcare AI system can enable physicians to provide high-quality care to their patients and help meet their health encounter.
Challenges in Healthcare
Generally, artificial intelligence and machine learning are good at solving well-posed problems whose solutions are verifiable and well defined. But the field of medicine poses problems whose solutions cannot be verified. For example, two seemingly similar cancer patients do not necessarily have expected outcomes, and it can change even more over time. That is where intelligent AI systems can make a difference by undergoing intense training and learning tons and tons of data!
5 Reasons Why AI Healthcare is the Future
1. Digital Consultation
AI healthcare systems undergo a deep machine learning process from several actual use cases to ask relevant questions to patients based on their health records instead of raising some impulsive questions. Moreover, advanced natural language understanding, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, etc., make it easier for the AI system to understand complex sentences and address patient’s queries. Thus, many advancements in AI solved issues with the traditional consultation apps.
2. Clinical Documentation
The pandemic has given healthcare providers burnout, yet they are driven to provide quality patient care with limited resources and inefficient documentation solutions. Documentation is the ‘lifeblood of patient care’. Patient stories have to be securely documented by physicians or other clinicians, while many hospitals still depend on paper-record systems. Embracing a cloud-based clinical speech recognition system allows physicians or clinicians to use their voice to capture patient stories more efficiently and relieves them of documentation burdens.
3. Efficient Diagnosis
A recent study reports that 15 diseases account for about half of all serious misdiagnosis-related problems, and 10% of patients with vascular diseases, infections, and cancers are misdiagnosed. The reasons for cognitive errors in the diagnostics process are
- Lack of evaluation of patient history, diagnostic features,
- Omission of physical exams, and medical decision-making
An intelligent AI healthcare system can improve diagnostics certainty by cleverly streamlining history, physical exams, and medical decision-making and identifying high-risk conditions quickly. For example, AI-based applications can detect cancer cells early and provide ways to prevent them from rapidly growing.
4. Smart Drug Discovery
Apart from efficient diagnosis, AI systems can be used in medicine development by training them to leverage vast databases and tons of critical information to identify potential therapies to effectively treat severe diseases like cancer, diabetes, cirrhosis, etc. With its deep machine learning and analytics capabilities, healthcare AI can accurately spot the trends and patterns of medicines to help scientists or researchers track drug development.
5. Virtual Patient Care
Doctors cannot attend to patients all the time, and it becomes a problem for patients who need regular care and check-ups. Healthcare AI chatbots can solve that issue by providing continuous support to patients who require daily attention. The patients can enter their problems, and the chatbot can immediately reply with an effective solution. Advanced AI chatbot can analyze and interpret handwritten text and images from patients, and after diagnosis, it provides medications by addressing their symptoms just as a human would do.
AI Healthcare Outreach
The complexity and rise of data in healthcare have potentially increased the need for AI across diagnosis and treatment recommendations, patients’ engagement and adherence, and administrative activities. The future of AI technology is very bright as it is already redefining the clinical workflows to help
- Physicians to do their best work
- Improve patient care quality
- Achieve best results for their patients and
- Get better analytics for continuous improvements
AI healthcare system helps providers mitigate data risks and reduce diagnostic errors while ensuring operational efficiency and significant patient recovery improvements. Artificial intelligence is applied to healthcare to transform patient care plus administrative processes within provider, payer, and pharmaceutical companies.
PreludeSys and AI healthcare
Artificial intelligence is a boon to the healthcare industry that helps improve the diagnostics process, patient care, and hospital efficiency. AI aims to simplify the lives of patients, providers, and doctors by performing tasks that are done by humans manually but in less time and at a fraction of the cost. Being a trusted Microsoft Gold Partner and a market leader, we leverage Azure bot services to understand customer’s pain points and improve that aspect of the business with our innovative AI solutions. We have transformed several healthcare leaders into modern healthcare providers by optimizing their revenue, cost, and quality. Not sure how a custom AI solution can be a game-changer for you? Talk to our Azure experts now!
