Will Artificial Intelligence Improve Health Care?
By Space Coast Daily // October 6, 2019
AI is already very prominent in many aspects of our daily lives. One of the sectors it has had a huge impact on, albeit quietly, is in healthcare. Present in most areas of healthcare, it has already revolutionized the industry’s databases and has enabled advanced surgeries as well as better training.
As technological advancements continue, the healthcare industry is increasingly dependent on tech to ensure the provision of an efficient, sophisticated and ever-more beneficial service.
Quicker, more accurate diagnostics are possible with the use of AI. Due to the ability to store and analyze large databases, medical centers can create holistic and detailed patient history logs, which are accessible immediately and transferable anywhere in the world digitally.
This allows healthcare professionals a better overview which in turn leads to better diagnosis.
AI is also able to spot patterns and detect anomalies which the human eye may miss, improving diagnostic accuracy and giving a broader spectrum of information – such as which medicines or treatments have previously been prescribed, which have worked successfully and which are not to be prescribed due to allergies or adverse effects.
Time and resource-saving self-diagnosis are also a beneficial side-effect of using AI in the medical field.
Many do use Google when looking to self-diagnose, however, this often induces panic when wrongful self-diagnosis leads the patient to think something more serious is wrong.
In turn, this wastes precious medical resources. With specially designed AI programs, self-diagnosis is smarter and able to analyze symptoms inputted alongside health data from personal devices such as health apps and smartwatches to come up with an accurate diagnosis.
This screening process may lead to virtual appointments over the video interface, with a GP if needed. This means fewer unnecessary trips to the doctors happen, creating a more efficient dialogue between patient and doctor.
Several conditions that have previously been classified as untreatable, be it due to cost or the technology not being there, treatable with the assistance of AI.
With more time, tech and research, we have come to hold a better understanding of how to best treat certain ailments permanently. AI and tech have assisted with the treatment of many conditions, most notably keyhole surgeries.
Robotics during surgery have become run of the mill – allowing for the use of smaller tools and more precise and steady movements that a human hand is incapable of, a larger number of operations are not only successful but require little or no follow-up surgery.
This improvement benefits both the healthcare sector and patients directly. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook notably invested heavily in healthcare technology for a US hospital, which has now changed their name to honor him, due to the tech making such a big difference.
Given the number of different aspects within healthcare where AI has already improved the medical field, it is widely agreed that in the next ten years we will continue to see tremendous leaps in terms of the AI available to the medical field and with this technological advancement will also come exciting prospects for medicine.
An improved healthcare sector, will, in turn, lead to longer life expectancy, one of the reasons that tech entrepreneur Tej Kohli believes his children will live to the ripe old age of 125.
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