The Future of AI in Healthcare
By Alex Fesl
The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is well underway. Across many industries, AI is rapidly transforming the landscape and outlook for the future. Healthcare, in particular, is ripe with innovation from this emerging technology, and it will impact many areas of healthcare, including patient care, diagnosis, treatment, and efficiency.
Transforming Patient Care with AI-Powered Chatbots
Healthcare is all about patient care. Patient care is the act of ensuring that the patient is kept happy and comfortable with their well-being. One of the ways AI is impacting patient care is with AI-powered chatbots / virtual assistants. Chatbots are able to answer quick questions about common medical concerns, treatments, and medications. Additionally, chatbots can handle routine tasks such as scheduling appointments, managing prescriptions, screening patients, and providing reminders for things like upcoming appointments. Lastly, AI chatbots are able to provide real-time language translation, which undoubtedly improves communication with patients and medical professionals.
Enhancing Medical Diagnosis with AI
Given the vast amount of data associated with healthcare, AI is able to analyze and recognize patterns in data, leading to faster and more accurate medical diagnosis. In particular, medical imaging is known for its complex data. AI is able to analyze slight abnormalities in reports like CT scans, MRIs, and X-rays that might be hard for the human eye to detect. Additionally, AI is able to scan and process data from electronic health records (EHRs) / electronic medical records (EMRs) in order to identify trends and recommendations associated with patient care.
Revolutionizing Patient Treatment with AI
Another key healthcare field being revolutionized by AI is patient treatment. With the use of AI, drug discovery and development can be streamlined and accelerated significantly. By analyzing data sets, AI is also able to identify potential drug candidates and drug interactions / side effects much faster. Likewise, AI is able to personalize medications and recommendations for patients. Providers and other medical professionals are able to offer more tailored treatment plans based on a patient's medical history. Another almost futuristic use of AI in healthcare is the implementation of AI-powered robots for surgical assistance. While it may seem frightening to trust a robot to help with surgery, robots are able to perform complex tasks with minimal invasiveness and highly accurate precision.
Ultimately what AI can offer healthcare is improved efficiency. Instead of spending excessive time on mundane and repetitive tasks, AI enables healthcare professionals to focus on what matters most, which is the patient.
Navigating the Ethical Challenges of AI in Healthcare
While AI offers immense possibilities, it is not without challenges and potential abuses. One of the glaring concerns of widespread AI usage is the ethical aspect. To explain, AI systems learn from data, and if that data is biased, the AI will amplify the biases. This can undoubtedly lead to discriminatory consequences, abuses, and the spread of misinformation.
Another concern with AI is privacy. AI systems often require huge amounts of data which often can be obtained without an individual's consent. That same data, which in healthcare's case is protected health information (PHI), can be used by unknown third parties.
Lastly, perhaps the most impactful concern with AI is the likelihood of job displacement. As stated previously, AI is capable of drastically improving efficiency. With that said, why would companies opt to have more workers when they can offload work to AI systems with a skeleton crew instead of a full staff? It's a very important question, economically and socially speaking. Large companies could lay off large swaths of employees, exacerbating inequality. Expect many regulations globally in the future to restrict this kind of tactic from companies.
Augmenting Human Expertise with AI
In the end, AI is not intended to replace human workers but, better yet, to augment their expertise. With the use of AI, productivity and efficiency increase, which leads to more opportunities to focus on what really matters to companies, which in healthcare’s case is the patient. More education and research on AI will be of utmost importance going forward. Likewise, industry and government leaders will need ethical guidelines for AI.
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