Lauren Williams
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been bringing a transformative change, revolutionizing the healthcare sector in many innovative ways. The Impact of AI is visible across various industries but when it comes to the health sector, AI has made some life-changing contributions which have brought a paradigm shift in the way care services were delivered and consumed. For the same reason, both public and private sectors are increasingly investing in AI-driven healthcare applications, devices, tools and systems to improve the quality of healthcare services.
From reducing medical costs to making Healthcare more affordable, accessible and efficient, AI together is making a noticeable impact from development to research field within the medical sector. Together with Big Data and its associated technologies, AI is driving meaningful insights from Real-Time Data to ensure faster and early detection of health issues.
Moreover, the Big Data and predictive analytics capabilities are adding to the advantage, making way for advanced technological integration with a view to improve and simplify care for all. The beneficial impact of AI and Big Data is quite evident across various health departments.
Impact of AI in the Healthcare Industry
From improved diagnosis to timely detection of diseases, artificial intelligence has been making positive contributions towards the betterment of the healthcare industry. Especially in areas such as pathology, pharma, and radiology, AI is already helping professionals achieve an improved quality of care services.
Below are the beneficial impact of AI upon the various departments of the healthcare ecosystem
AI-driven Health Apps Assisting Personal Health
In today’s digitally advanced era, every individual uses a smartphone and especially mobile apps to make life easier. The healthcare industry is not far away in tapping into the app world. There are many virtual assistants like Google, Siri, and Cortana that are driven by artificial intelligence and are designed to act as a personal health assistant.
Health apps backed by AI help patients with medication alerts, tracking on health stats, and keeps patients informed of their medical conditions through human-like interactions facilitated by virtual assistants.
Introduced Sleep Apps to Ensure Quality Sleep
Good sleep is the essential requirement of a healthy being. For your physical and mental health, good night sleep is necessary as it helps you to stay active, healthier, and energetic during the day. However, there are many who lacks proper sleep and suffers through various health issues as a consequence.
With AI coming into the scenario, things have changed for those who don’t get enough sleep due to some or the other reason. Today, various sleep gadgets are available that are effective in making an individual fall asleep. From AI-driven baby monitors to smart mattresses and apps, artificial intelligence combined with the deep learning algorithm is making tremendous advancements in the healthcare field.
Assisting with Accurate Medical Image Analysis
Radiology is one such field that has been using AI for quite some time now. Thanks to better analysis and precision capabilities, AI-driven diagnostic and imaging systems have made medical image analysis and diagnostic examinations more accurate and detailed. Compared to the human eye, AI-powered medical imaging tools provide error-free analysis that assists healthcare professionals in delivering better care to patients. One such example is IBM Watson that has provided evidence-based treatment options in the field of oncology. It was trained by physicians of Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK).
Enabling Precision Medicine
Genomics deals with evolution, structure, mapping, and function of genomes. This branch of molecular biology obtains disease information from the DNA. Combined with AI, genome made early detection of some vascular diseases and cancer. AI, together with genome analysis, has helped in the prediction of health issues in patients on the basis of their genes.
Improved Customer Service with Healthcare Bots
Even in the customer service domain, artificial intelligence is gaining momentum. In the recent past, healthcare organizations have been investing in healthcare bots to better engage with patients and offer them a convenient and satisfactory experience. AI powers all these bots and helps in establishing human-like interaction with the patients through telephone or chat window available on the website.
Moreover, healthcare bots also assist patients in scheduling appointments and medication. Through bots, healthcare organizations can offer 24×7 support to patients as well.
How Big Data Impacted the Healthcare Industry
With Big Data’s intervention into the healthcare space, implementation of Artificial Intelligence has been successful. Using Big Data analytics backed by AI techniques, a lot of relevant clinical information has easily been extracted from piles of data generated on a daily basis in the healthcare industry to make informed clinical decisions.
Impacts of Big Data in the healthcare sector:
Saves Money
With predictive analytics, hospitals have been able to save cost by predicting admission rate and efficiently allocating staff in accordance. As a result, issues like over or under booking staff leading to extra expenses are no longer blocking their way to the maximum utilization of their investment. Big Data has helped hospitals and the healthcare industry as a whole in saving money and properly utilizing the available resources with prior predictions.
Helps to Keep Check on High-Risk Patients
Healthcare industry is a storehouse of data that keeps on adding with every passing day. Earlier traditional data-processing tools and software were incompetent in organizing and extracting information from huge data sets generated in the healthcare industry.
But with Big Data, medical data is now better analyzed, systematically extracted, and organized to derive real-time insights for use in clinical decision-making. Moreover, nowadays are turning into digital record-keeping, which is helping hospitals better understand patient health patterns. All such advances have been possible due to the intervention of big data and predictive analytics.
Proper understanding of health conditions has helped hospitals identify chronic issues that often lead to frequent patient visits to the hospital. On the other hand, it has assisted hospitals in keeping a list of high-risk patients based on data insights and allowed the offering of customized treatment and care solutions.
Triggering Science and Technological Advancement in Healthcare
For healthcare, Big Data has helped in many ways. From driving scientific achievements to technological advancements, Big Data has fuelled overall improvements in the medical sector. Backed with artificial intelligence, IBM’s Watson has been extensively used to surf through numerous data sets collected by Big Data so that meaningful insights can be extracted from the piles of medical data.
There is no doubt that systematic and organized data extraction by Big Data and its associated technologies like predictive analytics has helped healthcare organizations, researchers and professionals to undertake technological advancements to ensure a better quality of care to patients. Further, emerging technologies have given healthcare professionals the power to estimate and track the origin and risk-level of contagious diseases to prepare for the future.
Like any other industry, AI and Big Data hold lots of potential for the healthcare industry as well. Organizations need to embrace and be ready to embrace technology if they want to expand their scope of growth and unleash new opportunities in their area of expertise.
