5 AI Opportunities in Healthcare and 1 Caveat

AI is transforming the healthcare landscape in real time. After working for health systems, I’ve had the opportunity to see into the fascinating world of AI-enabled healthcare technologies. Across the board, AI has the potential to generate dramatic efficiencies and effectiveness in workflow, clinical quality, and patient engagement.

Here’s where I see opportunities and one area where it falls short.

Improving Customer Service, especially After-Hours

AI can take the administrative burden off of healthcare employees. Healthcare staffing is notoriously difficult; answering simple and routine questions is a low-value use of their time and talent. It's also true that patients prefer to self-serve or to use live chat rather than talk on the phone. Consumer studies demonstrate that texting is preferred to talking on the phone, especially in younger demographics; healthcare organizations can offload tasks to texts, saving time and adding convenience for patients.

Patient Education

AI-powered computing can help to improve - not just replace - what we have today. Imagine being able to help a patient understand their post-treatment protocol, in their native language, appropriate to their educational level, and deliver real-time answers to questions (to be clear - not medical advice). Routine, yet important questions like: What is this vaccination for? When should I call my doctor if the swelling increases? These types of conversations can augment what patients are told today and be built using patient-specific clinical notes and after-visit summaries. For ongoing learning, clinicians can review summaries of commonly asked questions and adapt their directions to be more specific and clear, increasing the likelihood of patient understanding and thus adhering, to advice.

Providing Clinical Insights

One of the most exciting opportunities that I see is focused on using AI as a diagnostic force multiplier. Analyzing scans, such as X-rays, MRIs, and ultrasounds, to identify anomalies is tedious, time-consuming work, which can be dramatically optimized by the use of AI technology. AI can help identify and differentiate healthy tissue from tumors, highlighting these for radiologists; the radiologists become more efficient and precise in their reviews. Another interesting use case is in technology that helps clinicians obtain automatic fetal measurements during an ultrasound, which also provides greater consistency of the results. Human analysis is still needed, but AI can add speed and productivity increases to the process.

Reducing Administrative Burden

Healthcare organizations have a massive need to manage and operationalize clinical, operational, and financial data between parties (payers, providers, labs, patients, etc.) and schedule resources (staff, patient load, operating rooms, and supplies) efficiently. Using AI tools to streamline processes and automate data exchanges generates savings on both the human resources to do the work and creates better use of limited resources. One case study on AI-enabled operating room scheduling demonstrated a 7% increase in surgical case completions and 80% prime time utilization in the first year.

New pathways

One of the most powerful things that AI has demonstrated is its ability to help with new discovery paths - new drugs or new molecules or reviewing correlations between inputs and outputs which might indicate an opportunity for creating new life-saving drugs. This article outlines opportunities for medication development that are truly compelling.

Where AI - and all Computing - Falls Short in Healthcare

With all that said, AI is not a magic bullet. From my perspective, healthcare is a personal calling, rather than just a job. There is something deeply powerful about the human connection in healthcare, and AI cannot replace that. However, AI can help clinicians be more efficient and effective, and help their organization improve how they schedule, interact with, and improve the experience for patients.

It’s clear that AI has real promise to improve processes - make healthcare more efficient, more empathetic, and more effective and I’m excited to see all the innovation ahead. What are you most excited about with AI in healthcare?