Demystifying AI’s Role In Healthcare
The current fascination with Artificial Intelligence (AI)’s potential to revolutionize the way we communicate and conduct business has driven the health and wellness industries to dive headfirst into exploring to the potential of this tool’s impact. However, a closer examination of the longstanding history between healthcare and technology, yields the finding that while what AI can bring to the evolution of the space, there is still a need for human-centered design and to fuel the much-needed collective alignment that will benefit both patients and providers.
In my first piece for the Healthcare, Healthtech, Lifesciences, Wellness and Fitness (HLWF) Alliance, I outlined some of the new frontiers across technology, health and fitness. In it I shared a snapshot of the many tools and technologies that make up the vast ecosystem of Web3 and their potential for learning, growth and innovation. Today, as a continuation of this ongoing pursuit, I will dive deep into the AI space, exploring from my vantage point as someone who has roots in the fashion, luxury, retail and consumer x brand dialogue how AI can revolutionize healthcare, while also driving effective communication which is a key metric in health and wellness innovation.
How We Got Here
While second nature today, in the not-so-distant past, a vast change occurred in the health and wellness space. In the early 2000’s Electronic Health Records (EHRs) were on the rise and depending upon where you were in the world, technology was making at least a cameo appearance within the healthcare system.
Before this year’s Metaverse Beauty Week welcomed guests to Roblox, Decentraland, and Spatial to take an educational skincare journey alongside the avatar of brand ambassador Kerry Washington, after being welcomed to the ecosystem by virtual model, NYA, taking the place of a drugstore employee who could interpret the brand IRL, there was a different transformation that occurred more than 20 years prior in your doctor’s office.
Instead of the previous paradigm of looking into your physician’s eyes while relaying the symptoms of an ailment, or injury, your doctor’s appointment had an additional guest taking up more and more space in the sanctity of the patient care room, a computer.
As this 2005 study from the Journal of the American Medical Information Association found and shared in ‘A History of the Shift Toward Full Computerization of Medicine.’ by “..2003, both the public and private sectors took major steps to ensure that EHRs become a regular feature of medical offices within five to eight years.” They reported that “greater and faster information availability could allow physicians more time to thoroughly explain diagnoses and treatments or address patient concerns.” Which includes a superior ability to quickly uncover the patient’s medical history. With the data point of 82.3% of the patients reporting for this study that their physicians used computers in office visits.
The need for a translator, either human or computer-based, to help decipher the nuances and potential miscommunications between humans and machines was left out of the conversation. While it was often joked about that a doctor’s handwriting was difficult to read, there wasn’t a clear and patient-facing communication that ambassador an introduction to the role of technology within the medical and healthcare communications system. And yet, we evolved with the technology, patterns and habits and began to not only accept that there would forever be a keyboard, tablet, or even at times AI-assisted note taking tools within the haven of the exam room. But we took it one step further. We appropriated these types of behaviors into our own homes.
Taking Notes from Pop Culture
Who can forget Hannah Horvath’s obsession with Googling her symptoms on Lena Dunham’s coming of age series, GIRLS, circa 2012–2017. It’s hard to find someone who didn’t spend at least a bit of time in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic turning to resources like WebMD to attempt to find information and educate themselves about a virus that would impact so many. However, there have been many who have called into question the accuracy of sites that promise to provide us with answers to our most intricate array of symptoms.
In Spike Jone’s 2013 film, HER, Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, develops a relationship with his artificially intelligent virtual assistant, played by Scarlett Johansson, introducing attempts to address depression, mental health and fantasy through the introduction of an AI-based character.
Not only did pop culture lean in to the concept of turning to digital tools to help pinpoint health symptoms, during this time, it also explored the sensationalism of finding a respite from loneliness and a potential moment of mental wellness, through a Futurescape that made the 2805 lifestyle of obesity and lack of climate health, setting the stage towards a type of virtual reality portrayed in Disney x Pixar 2008's romance, WALL-E look like a distinct possibility.
And according to TIME Magazine’s description of a healthcare system that is made up of long waits, short appointments, there’s no question as to why patients may seek out a refuge from a climate that brought about a rampant burnout on behalf of both patient and physician.
That brings us to how AI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare, wellness and fitness, while charting a course to provide effective communication tools which are a key metric not only save lives but improve systematic communications as a whole.
How Can AI Impact Innovations in the Healthcare Industry
Definitions of AI abound, however this excerpt from the latest edition of Now to Next: News You Will Use Brand Whisper’s Guide to the Futureverse explains how AI became popularized:
The free public global launch in November, 2022 of ChatGPT, an app developed by OpenAI, introduced the concept of Gen AI (Generational Artificial Intelligence) to the mainstream. ChatGPT is meant to answer questions and assist you with tasks. It isn’t perfect. It sometimes makes up things. It has only been fed data through 2021, so it won’t help with this season’s football team rankings. But it is intuitive, groundbreaking, and powerful.
Gen AI, is an advancement over plain-old AI, engaging machine learning to produce text, video, images and other content based on user-given prompts or dialogue. Gen AI is able to not only ingest data but to recognize and learn underlying patterns to generate new data at speeds much faster than human brains process.
To set the stage, let’s examine the climate that we find ourselves in today. When diving deeper into the role of AI in Healthcare, Len Tacconi, Former Merck and HMR Weight Management Services Executive and Acting Head of Web3 health and wellness practice at Kate Newlin Consulting , and shared:
“This is a watershed moment for healthcare as emerging technologies and their related capabilities transform patient care. Sensors, smart devices, and other wearables will enable preventative care by helping providers to see patterns in data and using machine learning to flag anomalies before they do harm. These tools will improve the diagnosis and treatment of disease by alerting patients that lifestyle changes are needed PRIOR to disease onset and then helping them to implement these improvements to their nutrition, medication adherence, and physical activity. AR/VR tools can support education for new conditions and any application for treatment compliance. Providers and health systems will use these tools to expand both the quality and capacity for care extending the provider’s ability to improve the quality of lives. Virtual and IRL communities will enable patients to work together feeling supported in homogeneous, compassionate care groups. Applied well, we can reverse the sad decline in mortality and quality of life for so many people with these exciting new tools.”
What Role Does AI Play in Connecting Patients and Providers
International professional services network, Pricewaterhouse Coopers outlines a complementary model in their explanation of how AI and robotics are transforming healthcare. Calling out that one of the key potential ways AI can benefit the industry is “to help people stay healthy so they don’t need a doctor, or at least not as often. The use of AI and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in consumer health applications is already helping people.”
However, as Tacconi affirms, it’s not simply the technology of the moment that is summoning a massive opportunity for us to capture data-driven information, there is an opportunity for the implementation of that technology to correct considerable disconnects across health, wellness and fitness communications, to benefit both patient, provider and the larger business and organizations who are capitalizing on the industries as a whole. And while it is fashionable with hyped media coverage on the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to revolutionize the way we map our journeys through the medical system there is certainly a long history to the patient who is arriving to the office for what is estimated as a maximum of 15 minutes to spend with their care provider.
Enter AI. As Bethany Hills Grois, JD and MPH, and Partner at DLA Piper, states, “Generative AI has the potential to finally develop patient focused communication styles that can actually develop trust and long term connected relationships. Adherence to wearable and other digital empowered technologies is truly the key. It’s at that point the data finally becomes meaningful and we have longitudinal vision and insights such that we can really start to characterize the symptom, disease or general state of well-being.”
Taking Notes from Retail Technology
While I was introduced to emerging technologies and their implementation potential through the blockchain and wearable technologies space, it is not surprising that Grois and Tacconi, who each have substantial expertise in the health and wellness spaces both referenced the potential for wearable tools to implement the bridge required between technological advancements and the patient connection. There is an overlap, as a tool like the Apple Watch can provide patients and physicians with a variety of health and wellness information on their wrists. This vast array of opportunity to measure a variety of “aspects of health including heart health, mobility, activity, medications,” etc. offers a previously adopted link between a wearable device that users are already accustomed to being in an ongoing dialogue with. This is just one of many popular examples of how elements incorporating elements of virtual assistance and AI have already translated into existing pop culture.
ChatGPT can play a role in addressing social isolation and loneliness in adults who are experiencing mild cognitive impairment (MCI), by providing an access to human-like conversations. In this 2023 study published in Neurology Live, researchers Xiang Qi, PhD & Bei Wu, PhD explain: “By offering continuous social support, ChatGPT can potentially alleviate feelings of loneliness and help older adults with MCI maintain a sense of social connection. Benefits of using ChatGPT as a tool to combat social isolation and loneliness among older adults with MCI include a variety of areas of potential.”
If you’ve shopped online or via social media channels, you have probably interacted with AI-based chatbots, who have been incorporated into retail as shopping assistants. They fuel the pop up windows that inquire if you need support, answer questions about products they’re looking at, and can advise you offers. Imagine these types of assistants shepherding the medical experience, to ensure their immersive health experience is optimized, utilizing tools that link health, wellness and technology. In the video below, John Ziegler, a Software Engineer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center outlines the many impacts technology has made across the organization who has notably incorporated AI into patient care by aiding humans to review digital pictures including diagnostic images and pathology slides.
“Machine learning is very good at what you’ve taught it,” Larry Norton, MD, Medical Director of MSK’s Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center told Good Morning America during a segment on the increasing use of AI to help radiologists detect breast cancer. “But when machines see something they have no experience with, they’re not very good at identifying it.”
Therefore while there are promising tools with the potential to significantly augment a human expert’s perception, stamina, and efficiency. But, on the whole, they are still being fine-tuned. There is certainly an opportunity to evaluate the types of advancements that have succeeded in connecting consumer audiences with brands, especially within the lifestyle space, where ALO Yoga shared soundbaths and meditation within their Roblox ecosystem as a calling card to wellness meets Web3 fans and live shopping continues to be a phenomenon that fuels a growing Asian luxury market.
Fueling Connectivity and Community in Aging Populations
Communication and companionship are critical areas of focus within the health tech spaces as globally, 10 percent of the population is over 65+ and older, and these numbers rise to 19% in Europe, 17% in North America, and 13% in Oceania. With our aging population, comes the necessity for healthcare and technology to incorporate advancements taking into account issues of accessibility to those who are not digital-first. Additional as GenZ and GenAlpha patients continue to make their way into the health and wellness systems there is an increased need for
While we have turned to technological based tools to curate data and develop optimizations within the patient-physical continuum, there is still a desire and need for trust and communities that help to shape what we have grown to expect when we map a future of the health, wellness, fitness and life sciences ecosystems.
IBM Watson’s Health arm, which set forth to provide solutions to “ health professionals (who) make decisions that affect the health and well-being of their patients, members and citizens every day,” fell short with oncologists and other health professionals,” and is now Merative. However they did champion the “need (for) technology (to) help inform (health professionals) decisions, automate their daily tasks and empower them to do their best work for the people they serve.” And Aarti Samani, Founder of Shreem Growth Partners agreed.
She suggests there are 3 key ways that AI will impact the healthcare space and categorizes them as:
Image Recognition:
With the latest computer vision technology, (AI) can analyze medical images to identify negativities that may be missed by humans => early diagnosis, (to save) lives.Pattern Recognition:
(AI)) can analyze patient’s medical records, vitals, lifestyle, environment, sensor data and other factors and determine the likelihood of that individual suffering from a certain condition, and suggest preventative measures.Predict outbreaks:
By analyzing vast amounts of structured and unstructured data from seemingly unconnected sources in almost real time, (AI) can predict the likelihood of outbreak & spread of diseases. Imagine how useful this would have been at the peak of COVID.
AI’s Impact Across Healthcare
There are certainly other impactful areas that AI can impact the global healthcare industry.
In her examination of innovations across healthcare, and ‘techquity’ Rashmi Rao, Founder, HLWF ™ Alliance notes that: “AI not only improves services for patients but also orchestrates healthcare operations more efficiently. For instance, with AI, patients are automatically notified if their physician is running behind, enhancing the patient experience. The rapid adoption of AI tools speaks to the broad digital transformation happening across healthcare, making the delivery of care more efficient and effective.”
In her explanation of techquity as a whole Rao reference “ the potential of technology to bridge the gap between patients and healthcare providers, fostering a more equitable healthcare landscape,” which is an additional attribute of AI’s power to connect the many members across a potential communications divide.
Next Steps
In order to effectively harness the potential of advancement through tools like AI becoming implemented within the health and wellness ecosystems, it will not be seamless. Going back to the investigation of the efficacy of WebMD, when it was popularized, as Julia Belluz put forth the question in her piece for Vox, the dependability of the tool relies heavily upon the “ page you land on and what you’re looking for. The site may be an okay starting point for information, like Wikipedia. But the information isn’t always reliable, and unlike Wikipedia, the site’s business model relies on the same industry it reports on.”
Therefore, in order for AI to become a tool that represents more of a rubric than a ruse within the healthcare industries, there is a long journey towards understanding not only what tenants the technology has been built upon, but also how it can empower a circular conversation between patients, physicians and the ever-evolving tome of research that the industry is based upon. It will also need to be augmented by the various tools across the many emerging technology fields, such as wearables, avatar, digital collectibles, blockchain and gaming ecosystems in order to be fully digested, integrated and adopted across the future of how we connect to audiences within the health and wellness spaces, but also through the ever-evolving consumer, brand and cultural conversation.
Sasha Wallinger is a Chief Marketing Officer, Innovation &Foresight Strategist and Founder who has led transformative initiatives in house at global brands (Nike, H&M and SOREL) and agencies (HAVAS) with a specialty uniting fashion, sustainability and innovation. She has pioneered community, collaboration and creativity across the Web3 ecosystem (SuperGUCCI & Walmart’s Electric Fest) is a health and wellness practitioner who is passionate about mental and physical well-being.
