Sunny Pokala, CEO, Amtex Systems. Follow me at LinkedIn.
Over the past decade, AI has shaken things up in our daily lives, but one industry that’s really feeling the AI makeover is healthcare.
According to Precedence Research, AI in the healthcare market is on a massive growth spree. They predict it will jump by 37% every year from 2022 to 2030. In other words, it was worth about $15.1 billion in 2022, and they predict the market will be worth $187.95 billion in 2030.
Going forward, healthcare tech is only going to get better. We’re talking about big improvements in care quality and efficiency thanks to advanced technology. In this article, I’ll dive into how AI is impacting the healthcare industry today and how healthcare companies can succeed with its adoption.
How AI Empowers Healthcare
As the healthcare industry is realizing the benefits of AI integration, the market has seen many new healthtech startups leveraging complicated technologies and significantly furthering healthcare access. This has also brought some of these startups into the spotlight as the sector received billions of dollars in funding and investments over the last few years.
Part of the reason is that AI has evolved in healthcare. Previously, AI in healthcare meant finding a few considered decision rules that could help inform human medical smarts. Now, computers are much more capable of making sense of data like electronic health records (EHR) and learning from that data.
Here are a few specific ways that AI and healthtech are impacting healthcare:
Automating Mundane Tasks
AI can help healthcare workers automate mundane activities like administrative work and data entry. AI is utilized to maintain records, authorize insurance and follow up on unpaid bills. This frees up time for healthcare workers to focus on more value-adding work.
Providing Valuable Insights
Another significant way AI has been helping healthcare workers is by recording patient data in electronic health record (EHR) systems, analyzing the complex data using a series of techniques like big data analysis and machine learning and providing valuable insights for healthcare providers. This enables healthcare workers to make better treatment decisions based on predictive analysis, which can improve the quality of care.
Enabling Early Detection
AI is also utilized to provide better preventive care to patients with long-term serious illnesses. AI enables early detection of signs in patients and helps them seek treatment at the right time. This can help avoid emergencies in the hospital and provide timely treatment.
Increasing Treatment Efficacy
AI technologies and tools like machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and EHR tools help healthcare providers with better diagnosis accuracy and in finding better patient treatment pathways.
Overcoming AI Challenges
Implementing AI in healthcare, however, presents challenges beyond just technical issues. Here are a few considerations before adopting AI in healthcare environments:
• Security is crucial as data sources expand, requiring a zero-trust approach for securing protected healthcare data (PHI). Patient privacy is also paramount, as any breaches can have severe consequences.
• Ethical concerns, such as algorithmic bias and informed consent, emphasize the need to use AI to augment human decision-making, not replace it. Likewise, patient consent and trust in data use are essential for success, while upholding ethical principles is critical in building and maintaining trust.
• While AI can handle routine tasks, specialized jobs require human expertise. There are ways that AI can improve efficiency in specialized roles, but healthcare organizations should invest in training to ensure their workforce is prepared for AI and machine learning technologies.
• In healthcare, data quality is crucial. Inaccurate, inconsistent and biased data can harm AI models and perpetuate disparities. Diverse data formats hinder collaboration and insights. But, before getting started, it’s important to realize that normalizing data is vital but challenging due to complex, siloed systems.
Final Thoughts
Even though AI is just starting to make its mark in the healthcare field, it’s got incredible potential and is set to bring some exciting innovations in the coming years.
Healthcare startups have some big dreams for the next few years. They want to completely shake up the healthcare industry. Their vision is all about providing better patient care and outcomes to create an ecosystem that makes patients healthier and happier.
By understanding these trends and the challenges faced in adopting them, AI can be a game changer by cutting down costs, helping doctors make better decisions, improving patient outcomes and even catching deadly diseases sooner.
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