It is time we in healthcare embraced AI actively
By Dhrumil Sorathia, Group Chief Marketing Officer at Apollo Health and Lifestyle Limited
A lot is being discussed nowadays about the role of AI in healthcare. Am sure there are pros and cons of any new technology or advancement mankind has made. At the end of the day, it depends how and how much you use these new technologies to benefit you. Technologies like AI are meant to help you and I always believe if you know the healthcare industry very well and have a strong gut; technologies can be very useful to you. Let us understand the types of AI and then the use cases.
Artificial Intelligence or AI is majorly impacting 5 areas
- Robotics (and autonomous vehicles)
- Computer vision
- Virtual agents
- Language processing and
- Machine learning.
Deep learning capabilities underpin many of the advancements that AI has brought about in a recent couple of years. All the 5 areas mentioned above have relevance to healthcare and if adopted quickly and well can bring dramatic improvement in quality and efficiency. For example, AI has the potential to expand the database of expertise and knowledge that any individual experience will not be able to sum up in critical moments.
India currently has one doctor for 1,700 people and over 70% of the healthcare infrastructure is concentrated in urban areas catering to about 30% of the population. Hence the biggest challenge facing healthcare in India is access and affordability. AI combined with digitization can not only increase the effectiveness but bring down the cost of monitoring and diagnosing patients remotely. Thus making high quality medical expertise available to even the remotest of the places.
Adoption of RPA (Robotic Process Automation), voice assistants and chatbots are something companies are actively adopting and training the workforce. However, in most hospitals, even today, appointment scheduling is still done manually. Also, there is no concerted move to digitize medical records, histories, case studies and apply machine learning on top to skill and equip the medical fraternity with better knowledge and expertise so the patients can be served better.
Things are evolving though. According to a recent report, the market for AI in the healthcare application sector is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 42% till 2021. More interesting and important will be the research initiatives currently underway in multiple research institutions across India in this area and also the central and state government’s policy push to accelerate the adoption of disruptive technologies like AI in sectors like healthcare to improve not just the quality of healthcare being delivered but also access to it.
Here are quick specific areas where healthcare can benefit from AI and related technologies:
- Hospitals being better-equipped to forecast rise and lows in admission of patients
- Better tracking of communicable diseases by applying AI to numerous data that are gathered by different systems or even manage the health of our population by using medical and demographic data to anticipate rise in birthrates or communicate upcoming health hazards
- Image recognition software and deep learning methods combined will make MRI and X- ray analysis more accurate than the human eye can register
Can go on and on. But the writing on the wall is clear. It is time we in the healthcare sector embraced AI quickly and extensively, not only will it make us efficient but will also benefit millions of patients who come to us daily. We have started using #AI and are seeing good initial benefits and I am sure it’s going to help #healthcare a lot…