AI in Healthcare Industry – You head to a retail store and a salesman notices you. At a majority of places, they will become your companion until you complete the store visit and make a purchase or choose to leave.
If you’re confused about something and don’t know which one to buy, they will suggest your products, ask about your likes and dislikes, any previous purchases from the store among other things. A smart salesman will also take cues from your body language and understand your demands in a much better manner. That’s the magic of retail and that’s why customers love it.
But, with time the experience of a brick and mortar store has changed and people are heading towards eCommerce. While there was huge pressure on the industry to match the retail experience, which is practically impossible, there was something to be done so that customers could get hooked onto the platform and make purchases. For small businesses, this became a nightmare; because neither did they have a lot of neither investment nor much of technical know-how to beat the titans of the market. But, for the tech titans, bringing the retail experience to eCommerce was less troubling. If you’re wondering why the answer lies in today’s topic of discussion- artificial intelligence.
Today we have Amazon, that is bridging the gap between retail and digital shopping by delivering products within two hours of placing them, understanding the needs of the customer by observing their time spent on site, pages they browse, etc, suggesting products based on their purchase and browsing history along with presenting them with the best offers and discounts to incentivize the purchase. Customers do not just love it, but for many, it has become the local shop where you can just head to for the smallest of your needs. And all this is possible because of the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the field.
Raising the Standard of the Healthcare Industry
This is just one example of how things can turn around for industries that are harnessing the best of machine learning. And this is just enhancing customer experience or taking it from one notch to another. Imagine what happens when cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are applied to the most critical fields for humanity like the healthcare industry. Even if you leave the quantitative significance of the number of lives saved behind, the cutting edge technologies will raise the standard of healthcare and provide a much-enhanced level of care for the patients and the elderly.
With all the anticipation around the implementation of AI in the field of healthcare, actual changes have started taking place. Plenty of organizations around the world are implementing AI-powered solutions that are solving more than a few medical problems at hand. Similarly, medical institutions and researchers are working on using ML models to predict the underlying factors in a person that later builds up to a certain disease or genetic conditions. This is helpful especially for rare cancers and one in a million conditions.
The Present
One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming things about technology faster than they will be implemented in the world. This is one of the biggest challenges with artificial intelligence. While some people doubt its effectiveness saying that nothing concrete has been established or we don’t have this technology in certain parts of the world. There are others who think that AI and machine learning might replace doctors one day. This will remove the quintessential human touch from the field of healthcare.
And no doubt that artificial intelligence and machine learning are two technologies that are advancing at a rapid pace, but to form an extreme judgment too quickly on the effectiveness or impact is too shortsighted. With the current pace, artificial intelligence is authentically doing more good than adverse to the field of healthcare. There are many examples to support his fact.
- Google’s Deep Mind AI and Healthcare unit have come up with a new algorithm that has been trained on more than 70000 X-ray samples of women from the UK and USA and finds out whether they are likely to have breast cancer. The model was successfully able to reduce the number of false negatives and false positives in identification as compared to doctors.
- Kensi is a machine learning algorithm that predicts illness and treatment to assist physicians and intervene in a patient’s condition at an earlier stage. It also predicts population health risk by identifying patterns and surfacing high-risk markers, disease progression and more.
- Pathai’s AI technology harnesses machine learning to help pathologists make quicker and accurate diagnosis along with identifying patients that might benefit from new types of treatments or diagnosis.
- Microsoft’s Project Inner Eye employs machine learning to differentiate between tumors and healthy anatomy of an individual using 3D radiological images. Among others, it assists medical experts in radiotherapy, surgical planning and other things.
Here’s What the Future Holds
As we advance into the future, there are more than a few areas of opportunity where artificial intelligence can advance. A report by Deloitte suggests that innovation and AI will blur the boundaries of healthcare in the future. There will be a large scale disruption and the focus of the industry will shift to well-being and care-delivery of people. Data and platforms will form the backbone of tomorrow’s healthcare system and help generate insights for decision making.
Similarly, personalized health care will be one of the biggest trends to sweep the industry. Medical experts will be drawn towards the field to explore the possibility of personalized medicine that will be given to a patient on the basis of their gene type, medical history, past drugs, demographic information along with other parameters.
Conclusion
With the implementation of AI in Healthcare IT Services, it is already helping medical experts make better decisions and diagnose diseases in a much better manner. As time passes by and more and more electronic health records are established across the world, the potential of AI to manifest for real impacts in the world will increase by multiple folds. The standard of the healthcare industry will rise from being just seeing patients to providing them with quality care. Ultimately, it will improve population health management and improve the quality of life for people, the seeds of which are being shown by different organizations across the world.
