AI Could Revolutionise is one of the areas of the technology sector that is expanding the quickest. The potential for AI is expanding at an unprecedented rate, from voice synthesis that brings fictitious and real characters to life to text prediction that is becoming so accurate you may be misled into thinking you were speaking to a real person. One sector embracing AI is healthcare. The potential advantages of AI in healthcare cannot be overlooked, even if it can be a time-consuming process to adjust the systems.
Operating In Tandem with Equipment and People
The potential for AI to improve the healthcare industry is quite promising. Though many people believe that physicians may be replaced by AI, experts largely concur that AI alone could only be as effective as the average doctor. The likelihood of AI doing poorly is higher. When used in collaboration with doctors and used to speed up and improve their performance, artificial intelligence would truly shine.
Disease diagnosis and treatment is one instance of this. Compared to a human researcher’s study abilities, AI has the capacity to analyze databases that are many times larger than anything that a doctor could ever hope to look at. Therefore, it stands to reason that an AI assistant for doctors would be a huge help and significantly speed up the process of the patient visiting the doctor and obtaining a diagnosis, especially when it comes to minor injuries and diseases.
In a similar line, AI may support medical care. It may access a database of every medication, form of physical therapy, and procedure, as well as the success rates for each depending on several criteria. They can be informed about the severity of the patient’s illness, and AI could create a treatment plan for that patient very fast. As the AI lacks social cues and the capacity to be aware of any personal or specific situations, it is obviously preferable for the doctor to still approve the plan. It would be considerably easier for a doctor to double-check an AI-generated treatment plan than to create one from scratch, which is a perfect illustration of how AI in healthcare cannot replace doctors but may be very helpful to them.
Brain-to-body communication
The discovery of novel pharmaceuticals for use in patient treatment is another area in which AI might revolutionize the healthcare sector. AI has proven to be a valuable tool for locating and targeting disease-causing chemicals, locating a protein that binds them, and locating disease-related biomarkers in human blood. This information is essential for identifying and diagnosing diseases as well as for the creation of medications that specifically target certain disorders. It has also demonstrated tremendous promise in predicting elements like toxicity, bioactivity, and physiochemical responses in the usage of these medications by people. While all of this quickens the process of developing a new treatment to treat a condition, it also significantly lowers the expense and labor requirements.
While we have already spoken about how AI will affect physical healthcare, it is also expanding to include mental healthcare. In the case of mental health, clinicians must work with patients to get information from them. Instead, in order for doctors to understand and diagnose the illness, it is necessary for the patient to disclose what they are thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Evidence-based medicine, or EBM, is what this is. One of the problems of EBM is that it may be famously wrong since the patient may not be able to explain their experience accurately, or the doctor may diagnose too quickly or take too long and essentially overthink the situation.
When this occurs, the patient’s therapy essentially turns into experimenting until the ideal course of action is discovered. By identifying certain patterns in the patient’s behavior, AI could be able to intervene in this situation and enhance the diagnosis process. For instance, subtle speech patterns may be a sign of anxiousness or a depressive disease. It could be possible to reduce the number of diseases that a patient might have using a comparable database to the one mentioned above, and it might even be possible to identify symptoms that a doctor would miss because they are too subtle or because of human fallibility. In order to speed up patient diagnosis and treatment, AI may also be used to suggest the best course of action for a patient, again at the doctor’s discretion. Wearable technology, such as smartwatches, is another use for AI in mental health treatment. With the use of these technologies, doctors may monitor their patients’ heart rates, activity levels, sleep patterns, etc. and incorporate this data into their diagnosis and therapy.
Additional Advantages gf AI In Healthcare
These are but a few potential applications for AI in healthcare, and adding AI to healthcare systems may have advantages beyond simply assisting individual patients. The strain on healthcare professionals is at an all-time high, to use the NHS as an example. According to workforce projections, the NHS would need an additional 314,000 healthcare workers by the years 2030 and 31.1 Around 250,000 workers are believed to be needed more than there are workers available. By 2030, there will be a 5,000,000-doctor shortage worldwide.2 The fact that there are fewer healthcare professionals means that the ones we do have are under considerably greater strain.
What AI Can Do for Us In Healthcare
AI will not be able to solve the staffing shortage on its own, but it can at least ease some of the pressure by taking some of the work that goes into each patient. This will reduce the time it takes to examine, diagnose, and treat each patient and, as we have discussed, will lower the cost of doing so. To be blunt, the widespread deployment of AI in healthcare has the potential to drastically reduce the burden for physicians and other healthcare workers, which will surely make their professions much more desirable. As a result, AI may indirectly lead to an increase in the number of employees pursuing careers as nurses or physicians.
The testing and use of AI in healthcare are still in their infancy, but the early trials look very promising. The US Food and Drug Administration introduced the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Based Software as a Medical Device Action Plan to regulate the rapidly developing technology and ensure its benefits are properly utilized. The UK government has invested £250 million in the NHS AI Lab by 2020.
