With the advent of automation, artificial intelligence(AI), and machine learning, we hear about their applications regularly in news across industries. This has been especially true for healthcare where various hospitals, health insurance companies, healthcare units, etc. have been impacted in more substantial and concrete ways by AI when compared to other industries.
In the recent years, healthcare startups and life science organizations have ventured into Artificial Intelligence technology and are one of the most heavily invested areas by VCs. Various organizations with ties to healthcare are leveraging the advances in artificial intelligence algorithms for remote patient monitoring, medical imaging and diagnostics, and implementing newly developed sophisticated methods, and applications into the system.
Let’s explore some of the most popular AI applications which have revamped the healthcare industry.
Proper maintenance and management of medical records
Assembling, analyzing, and maintaining medical information and records is one of the most commonly used applications of AI. With the coming of digital automation, robots are being used for collecting and tracing data for proper data management and analysis. This has brought down manual labor to a considerable extent.
Computerized medical consultation and treatment path
The existence of medical consultation apps like DocsApp allows a user to talk to experienced and specialist doctors on chat or call directly from their phone in a private and secure manner. Users can report their symptoms into the app and this ensures the users are connected to the right specialist physicians as per the user’s medical history. This has been made possible due to the existence of AI systems.
AI also aids in treatment design like analyzing data, making notes and reports from a patient’s file, thereby helping in choosing the right customized treatment as per the patient’s medical history.
Eliminates monotonous manual labor
Various medical tasks like analyzing X-Ray reports, test reports, CT scans and other common tasks can be executed by robots and other mechanical devices more accurately. Radiology is one such discipline wherein human supervision and control have dropped to a substantial level due to the extensive use of AI.
Aids in drug manufacture and creation
Generally, billions of dollars are spent on developing pharmaceuticals through clinical trials and they take almost a decade or two to manufacture a life-saving drug. But now, with the arrival of AI, the entire drug creation procedure has been simplified and has become pretty reasonable as well. Even in the recent outbreak of the Ebola virus, AI was used for drug discovery, to redesign solutions and to scan the current existing medicines to eradicate the plague.
Regular health monitoring
In the current era of digitization, there are certain wearable health trackers – like Garmin, Fitbit, etc. which can monitor your heart rate and activity levels. These devices help the user to keep a close check on their health by setting up their exercise plan, or reminding them to stay hydrated. All this information can also be shared with your physician to track your current health status through AI systems.
Helps in the early and accurate detection of medical disorders
AI helps in spotting carcinogenic and cardiovascular disorders at an early stage and also aids in predicting health issues that people are likely to contract due to hereditary or genetic reasons.
Enhances medical diagnosis and medication management
Medical diagnosis and medication management are the ultimate data-based problems in the healthcare industry. IBM’s Watson, a deep learning system has simplified medical investigation and is being applied to oncology, specifically for cancer diagnosis.
Previously, human doctors used to collect patient data, research on it and conduct clinical trials. But with AI, the manual efforts have reduced considerably.
For medication management, certain apps have been developed to monitor the medicines taken by a patient. The cellphone camera in conjunction with AI technology to check whether the patients are taking the medication as prescribed. Further, this also helps in detecting serious medical problems and tracking patients medicine adaptability and participants behavior in certain scientific trials.
To conclude, we can connote that we are gradually embarking on the new era of cognitive technology with the power of AI-based systems. In the coming years, we can expect AI to transform every area of the healthcare industry that it brushes up with. Experts are constantly looking for ways and means to organize the existing structure and power up healthcare on the basis of new AI technology. The ultimate goals being to improve patient experience, build a better public health management and reduce costs by automating manual labor.
Author Bio
Maria Thomas is the Content Marketing Manager and Product Specialist at GreyCampus with eight years rich experience on professional certification courses like PMI- Project Management Professional, PMI-ACP, Prince2, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), Big Data, Cloud, Digital Marketing and Six Sigma.
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