Health.AI 2017: State of the Union
The state of AI in Healthcare is changing faster than a crashing patient in the ICU. The following is a snapshot of AI in healthcare from the perspective of 50 executives at the hottest AI health companies.The data presented is from an upcoming publication from www.techemergence.com. Check out TechEmergence for more information.
The last few years have yielded a tremendous amount of attention at the intersection of AI and healthcare, from DeepMind’s partnership with the UK’s National Health Service to IBM’s continued pushes into areas of genomics and drug discovery. As a sign of the times, the FDA recently created the Digital Health Unit to address the growing number of products in AI health. From the perspective of healthcare executives, however, many important questions are left unanswered and rarely addressed in detail:
What difference are healthcare’s machine learning innovations likely to make in the lives of patients?
What disruptions should healthcare executives prepare themselves for now?
How will the healthcare industry operate differently in 5 or 10 years into the future?
TL;DR The Big 5 Highlights the Health.AI Future
- Broad Scale AI Adoption by 2025: Over 50% of respondents believe that AI will be ubiquitous in healthcare by 2025. On an open-ended question, over 25% of respondents stated that they believe that AI will be nearly ubiquitous in healthcare setting by 2025.
- Dire Need for AI Healthcare Case Studies: Nearly 50% of US companies believe that the healthcare industry “needs to be convinced further of ROI from AI / ML investments”.
- Decision Support Systems to Improve Patient Care Come First: “Decision support systems” was ranked as the most likely application to be improved by AI (for improving patient outcomes), with an average 4.15 score on a 1–5 scale.
- Hospitals Purchase Mostly by Patient Outcomes and Financial Efficiencies: “Improving Health Outcomes” was rated as the factor of highest importance in getting a customer to buy an AI product, rated a 4.2 on a 1–5 scale. “Saving Money” was rated a close second with a 4.1 score. Most other reasons rated as significantly less meaningful in closing healthcare deals.
- AI’s Near-Term Focus Will be Improving Chronic Conditions: “Chronic Conditions” was listed in nearly one-half of responses when execs were asked to predict patient care improvement across ailments. Of the specific conditions mentioned under “Chronic Conditions”, “Diabetes” topped the list at nearly 30% of the mentions. “Cancer” was less popular, and was listed by slightly over one-third of respondents.
The Nitty-Gritty Pretty Details
Although the Singularity isn’t expected to occur before 2045, it seems most health.ai execs believe that AI will be ubiquitous in healthcare by 2025.
So which diseases and conditions are most likely to be impacted by AI? The overwhelming majority of companies in the health AI space believe that chronic conditions, like those listed below, will benefit from AI.
Talking about AI in healthcare is great, but what does it really mean for AI to improve patient outcomes? Intelligent algorithms can help guide doctor’s decisions based on patient data, they can identify disease from an image, they can monitor chronic conditions, accelerate research. The list goes on and on. See below for the top applications of AI in healthcare.
Healthcare is a notoriously tricky area. Investments are risky and product development is challenging due to many hurdles. Regulatory issues, saturated and competitive markets, and complicated consumers complicate the industry landscape. Industry leaders in Health.ai believe that lack of proof points, industry conservatism, and regulation are the biggest difficulties in sales for AI health products.
So once the hurdles of Health.AI are jumped, the products are produced, and the investors are in who do AI health companies plan to sell to? The overwhelming majority plan to sell to healthcare facilities and hospitals.
So in summary, the future of Health.AI will see broad scale AI adoption by 2025. There is a dire need for AI Healthcare case studies. The most likely application of AI in healthcare will be as decision support systems to improve patient care. The first and most important customer of Health.AI products will be hospitals, to improve patient outcomes and financial efficiencies. The near-term focus of Health.AI will be on improving chronic conditions.
List of Health.AI companies Interviewed for their opinion:
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