Artificial intelligence (AI) is a burgeoning opportunity for healthcare providers and tech companies. This new frontier is helping to solve a myriad of healthcare challenges, such as reducing costs by improving delivery processes. Tech companies are creating new revenue streams by broadening their product offerings.
8 practical ways AI will improve healthcare
Assessing interactions between drugs to protect patients from injurious prescriptions.
Gathering and centralizing information about a patient’s medications, treatments, and appointments to customize health programs.
Tracking a patient’s eating and exercise habits to design personalized fitness plans.
Monitoring patient adherence to treatment plans to speed convalescence.
Reducing elder abuse by monitoring and analyzing caregivers and long-term care facility activities.
Monitoring patients’ hearts using a camera to free up time for doctors and nurses to focus on more specialized tasks.
Monitoring emergency room patients’ reactions to treatment and immediately notifying doctors of any complications.
Tracking the well-being of first responders and hospital workers so they are less likely to make errors.
Examples of AI in action
Speeding up access to emergency services with AI
For example, Humber River Hospital in Toronto has deployed AI to speed up patient access to its emergency services. Using data from the hospital’s computers, the AI program accurately predicts how many people will arrive in the emergency department up to two days in advance. The AI program accesses data about admissions, wait times, transfers and discharges to identify where bottlenecks are likely to occur. The hospital can then adjust human and technical resources accordingly.
The potential for AI in healthcare is seemingly limitless. If the Humber River Hospital program was expanded throughout the Greater Toronto Area, it is conceivable ambulances could be directed by the fastest routes to the hospitals with the shortest wait times and have the necessary medical experts on hand to receive them. This approach could move patients through the system more efficiently and reduce wait times on a city-wide basis. It could also reduce stress levels for first responders, and medical practitioners while reducing patient suffering and delivery costs.
Doing patient triage remotely
AI could even remotely triage patients, schedule those needing to see a nurse or doctor based on the severity of the illness and healthcare provider availability, and even arrange transportation. Why send an ambulance when public transportation will do?
Enabling Robot Optometrists
If a chatbot can help fill a prescription for eyeglasses, why not use a robot to determine the prescription in the first place? An AI-controlled robot could potentially calculate a prescription, select the lenses, determine the frame size, recommend which glasses will be suitable based on face recognition software, and then place an order so the glasses are delivered promptly to the patient by a drone. Science fiction? No. All the components already exist. They will eventually be connected to a process using AI-driven technology.
Minimizing human error
AI can be used to create more precision in areas where human error commonly occurs. Bots and robots do not suffer human conditions such as being tired, hungry, distracted or upset. While human error can result in medication complications, a robot could be programmed to be much more accurate. Accuracy rates will increase through machine learning. If, for example, patients received scannable wristbands or implants, robots could dispense the right drugs in the right amounts at the right times.
Medical activities require precision and are subject to rigorous audits and compliance. Yet, the Canadian Medical Association reports that almost 6% of hospital admissions result in patient harm – which costs $1.1 billion annually in Ontario alone.
It is unfair to expect 100% accuracy from humans who work in fast-paced and stressful emergency rooms where chaotic situations often arise. However, AI does not experience conditions such as exhaustion and sleeplessness that commonly impair human judgment. Instead, AI can perform various tasks faster, cheaper and with considerably more precision.
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