How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming the Healthcare Industry

AI is changing every industry, and that certainly includes healthcare. 

Doctors, nurses, administrators, medical credentialing specialists, and more—they’re all experiencing changes in their day-to-day routines because of innovations in artificial intelligence. Although AI comes with ethical implications that need to be addressed in healthcare, it is also providing many exciting changes for patients and providers alike. 

How AI is helping patients

Countless AI-based technologies have emerged to help improve the lives and experiences of patients at all stages of the healthcare journey. From scheduling and appointment-making to improved health outcomes, AI is changing the patient experience. 

Virtual Health Assistants

You can think of a virtual health assistant as a digital companion who uses conversational AI tools to guide users through processes like symptom assessments and healthcare decision-making. You may find these tools integrated into personal wellness devices like smartwatches and sleep trackers. 

Virtual health assistants will analyze data from sleep and activity trackers to give you feedback and personalized insights.

Ambient Clinical Intelligence  

Ambient Clinical Intelligence (ACI) is a relatively new technology that you may encounter at the doctor’s office. You know how doctors and nurses often spend a large portion of your appointment entering notes into a laptop or tablet? ACI is a voice-activated tool that listens to medical conversations and automatically creates clinical documentation. 

The goal of ACI is to foster more meaningful healthcare interactions between patients and providers. However, the healthcare industry is still sorting out the best ways to use ACI, and providers will only use this feature with your expressed consent. 

Remote Patient Monitoring

Historically, patients have had to do most testing in clinical settings. The development of wearable health technologies has created opportunities for more flexibility in when, where, and how patients can be monitored. 

Remote patient monitoring involves non-invasive sensing technologies that track your vitals, behavioral patterns, and other health factors. Instead of having to be in the doctor’s office for this tracking, the information is collected while you go about your daily routine, then sent in real-time to your healthcare provider. 

Remote Patient Monitoring is about detecting subtle changes in your health early enough to enable timely interventions. 

Administrative Streamlining 

Healthcare offices are now using smart operational systems supported by AI to do all kinds of tasks, including: 

• Appointment scheduling
• Resource distribution
• Facility workflows
• Billing 
• Insurance filing

By optimizing these processes, healthcare organizations can provide more effective services to their patients. 

How AI supports people with specific diagnoses 

Although every patient is likely affected by AI in healthcare, patients with some conditions or diagnoses are more likely to see new AI technologies at work. AI-

Advanced Medical Imaging Analysis 

Going in for diagnostic imaging can be stressful, especially if the results don’t give your doctor clear answers about what’s going on. Sophisticated AI image recognition systems can detect subtle abnormalities in radiological scans with remarkable accuracy—helping physicians to identify issues they may have otherwise missed. 

These specialized tools assist in diagnosing conditions across multiple specialties, which means your physician doesn’t have to be a specialist in all areas of medicine to recognize issues that could be affecting your health. Medical imaging analysis with AI can notify providers of the need for further testing or diagnostic evaluation from other specialists. 

Cancer Treatment Planning Assistance 

AI developers have created precision mapping tools that automate the complex process of defining radiation therapy boundaries for patients with cancer. These tools are extraordinarily effective at shortening pre-treatment prep time, which means that patients are able to start life-saving therapies faster. 

These same technologies are also used to identify aggressive cancers during the diagnostic period. 

Early Disease Detection

Health pattern analysis engines, fueled by AI, can identify subtle correlations in a patient’s data that reveal risk for specific conditions. These are predictive tools that provide targeted preventive strategies even before symptoms become pronounced. Healthcare technology specialists understand the importance of early disease detection and are using AI to suggest treatment options before conditions become irreversible. 

How AI helps healthcare providers 

We’ve got a pretty long list here of how healthcare professionals’ jobs are changing because of AI. The goal, of course, is not that AI will replace doctors, but that it will make the work of practicing medicine easier and more accurate. Hopefully, this leads to improved outcomes and less burnout for those who work in medicine. 

• Automated documentation eliminates hours of paperwork for clinicians, which can be spent providing patient care instead 
• AI assistants can analyze patient information and suggest a potential diagnosis for clinicians to review 
• Smart systems can forecast patient volumes as well as visit complexity, which means that administrators can do a better job of staffing and resource allocation
• AI can provide an early warning system that continuously monitors patient data, identifying subtle deterioration patterns before more obvious symptoms appear—this is great for assessing patient risk! 
• Administrative tasks can be automated to streamline the patient’s experience and improve the provider’s workload
• Data analysis tools can process vast amounts of clinical information quickly, reducing the time it takes to do complex data work
• Remote consultation tools can prepare patient info, prioritize cases based on urgency, and suggest relevant clinical questions before telehealth and in-person appointments

What are the risks of AI in healthcare settings? 

New technologies are never all-good or all-bad. Accompanying these many benefits are a number of risks. Some are relatively minor, but others can add up to some pretty serious concerns. 

These risks include: 

• Privacy gaps that could expose HIPAA-protected information to unauthorized users
• Built-in bias in AI systems could affect patient care
• AI apps need to be carefully evaluated for data collection concerns—who is storing patient and provider data? 
• Ethical concerns 
• Informed consent issues—do patients understand what they are consenting to? 
• Security risks, especially for platforms that store patient data

Our takeaway: AI is changing healthcare, but caution is warranted

With all of these changes, you can see why healthcare providers and some patients are excited about the ways that AI can change the medical industry. There are plenty of other examples than the ones we have included here! After all, AI is impacting every industry that is related to healthcare, such as medical device engineering, healthcare marketing, the insurance industry, and much more. 

Although we can anticipate some great outcomes based on AI, it’s also important to retain some healthy skepticism of AI innovations that have the potential to remove the humanity out of healthcare. 

The future of healthcare is changed with every new technology, and many of those changes are positive. However, healthcare organizations and companies will need to proceed with caution, keeping patient care at the forefront of their AI-focused research and development.