Impressions of AI in Healthcare
“Artificial Intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.”
What is Artificial Intelligence? It is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI is an interdisciplinary science with multiple approaches, but advancements in machine learning and deep learning are creating a paradigm shift in virtually every sector of the tech industry. In simple terms, it’s the ability of computers to do things that are considered attributes of human intelligence: processing language, understanding pictures, detecting patterns, etc.
Cool right!?
With the rapid developments in our ever-expanding world, the integration of human intelligence along with artificial intelligence is essential. Integrating AI into the healthcare ecosystem allows for a multitude of benefits, including automating tasks and analyzing big patient data sets to deliver better healthcare faster, and at a lower cost. For Instance, AI is being used to analyze data throughout a healthcare system, automate and predict processes. It has been used to predict ICU transfers, improve clinical workflows and even pinpoint a patient’s risk of hospital-acquired infections.
》Current practices and methods of AI in healthcare
AI Chatbots
Chatbots are software developed with machine learning algorithms, including natural language processing (NLP), to stimulate and engage in a conversation with a user to provide real-time assistance to patients.
Chatbots have already gained traction in retail, news media, social media, banking, and customer service. Many people engage with chatbots every day on their smartphones without even knowing. From catching up on sports news to navigating bank applications to playing conversation-based games on Facebook Messenger, chatbots are revolutionizing the way we live.
Healthcare payers, providers, including medical assistants, are also beginning to leverage these AI-enabled tools to simplify patient care and cut unnecessary costs. Whenever a patient strikes up a conversation with a medical representative who may sound human but underneath is an intelligent conversational machine — we see a healthcare chatbot in the medical field in action. Chatbots provide instant conversational responses and make connecting simple for patients.
How it works: This healthcare chatbot system will help hospitals to provide healthcare support online 24 x 7, it answers deep as well as general questions. These chatbots help care providers to surpass patient expectations and improve patient outcomes. There are three primary use cases for the use of chatbot technology in healthcare — informative, conversational, and prescriptive. These chatbots vary in their conversational style, the depth of communication, and the type of solutions they provide.
Ada is an example of AI Chatbot currently in use which was created by scientists, engineers, and doctors. Enriched with NLP and AI capabilities, Ada can help patients determine potential ailments and suggest possible treatments easily. Once the fastest-growing health app in Europe, Ada Health has attracted more than 1.5 million users, who use it as a standard diagnostic tool to provide a detailed assessment of their health based on the symptoms they input. Ada chatbot asks the user simple questions and runs their answers on a dataset of thousands of similar inputs and cases to provide the most approximate evaluation of their health and offer relevant solutions. Ada also provides users with detailed information about medical conditions, treatments, and procedures and connects them to local healthcare providers.
The advantages of using hybrid chatbots in healthcare are enormous and all stakeholders share the benefits. For once, medical chatbots reduce healthcare professionals’ workload by reducing hospital visits, reducing unnecessary treatments and procedures, and decreasing hospital admissions and readmissions as treatment compliance and knowledge about their symptoms improve. For patients, this comes with a lot of benefits:
- less time spent commuting to the doctor’s office
- less money spent on unnecessary treatments and tests
- easy access to the doctor at the push of a button
However, one of the greatest disadvantages of chatbots is that they have been designed to handle first-level questions only. They may not be able to solve complex queries. You need to train them to converse with your customers in the right way.
Robot Surgery
One year ago, the headlines flashed, ‘Gujarat doctor makes history’, crediting cardiac surgeon Dr. Tejas Patel with conducting the world’s first telerobotic surgery on a patient in Ahmedabad. Sitting 32 kilometers away from his patient, a middle-aged woman with a blocked artery at Apex Hospital, Dr. Patel guided the robotic arms through a joystick to perform the coronary intervention. The surgery sounded rumblings of a shift in healthcare. Is robotics the way to go?
When it comes to orthopedic and spinal surgical procedures, nothing compares to the precision, flexibility, and control robotic-assisted technology has to offer. These are a type of surgical procedures that are done using robotic systems. Modern technology makes robotic surgery safer than ever. The following decade saw an unprecedented growth of robotic surgery in India. There are currently 66 centers and 71 robotic installations as of July 2019, with more than 500 trained robotic surgeons in our country. In surgeries at critical locations, there’s something called the fulcrum effect. Given the limited area of access, the human hand finds it difficult to maneuver tools.
When working in difficult areas, especially in the abdomen and pelvic regions, the robot hand can move 360 degrees and provide better dexterity and precision, Moreover, it minimizes fatigue: the surgeon need not stand for hours for one surgery.” Add to that the camera provides a 3D magnified real-time visualization of what the surgeon is operating on. The camera makes visible the smallest structures and blood vessels that our naked eyes can’t see. Easier access and less tissue damage also help reduce blood loss and the need for transfusion, and correspondingly, the chances of infection: all in all, making recovery quicker.
The only disadvantage? A surgical robot such as da Vinci Xi (the most prevalent in India) costs upward of ₹14 lakh — something that will undoubtedly translate into costlier surgeries for patients. Complex robotic surgery is likely to be nearly ₹2 lakh costlier than a laparoscopic one.
Internet of Medical Things(IoMT)
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is the collection of medical devices and applications that connect to healthcare IT systems through online computer networks. An increase in the number of connected medical devices that are able to generate, collect, analyze or transmit health data or images and connect to healthcare provider networks, transmitting data to either a cloud repository or internal servers. By 2020, 40% of IoT related to technology will be health-related, more than any other category, making up a $117 billion market.
The capabilities of IoMT are more accurate diagnoses, fewer mistakes and lower costs of care. IoMT examples include sensors in pharmaceutical shipments that measure temperature, shock, humidity, and tilt; end-to-end visibility solutions that track personalized medicine for a specific cancer patient) using radio-frequency identification (RFID) and barcodes; drones that offer faster last-mile delivery.
》Importance of inclusion of AI in healthcare in future
The future of AI in health care could include tasks that range from simple to complex — everything from answering the phone to medical record review, population health trending and analytics, therapeutic drug and device design, reading radiology images, making clinical diagnoses and treatment plans. The role of artificial intelligence in healthcare has been a huge talking point in recent years and there’s no sign of the adoption of this technology slowing down, well, ever really!
AI in healthcare has huge and wide-reaching potential with everything from mobile coaching solutions to drug discovery falling under the umbrella of what can be achieved with machine learning.
That being said, many healthcare executives are still too shy when it comes to experimenting with AI due to privacy concerns, data integrity concerns, or the unfortunate presence of various organizational silos making data sharing next to impossible. I would like to conclude by quoting “We’re at the beginning of a golden age of AI. Recent advancements have already led to an invention that previously lived in the realm of science fiction — and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible,” Jeff Bezos, Founder, and CEO, Amazon
References:
https://kore.ai/solutions/industries/healthcare/
