Three Ways AI Could Transform Healthcare in 2019

“In the future, no company will dare to claim that it has nothing to do with artificial intelligence,” said Robin Li, founder of Baidu, at the 2018 World Artificial Intelligence Conference. As he noted, AI has gradually permeated every industry, from autonomous vehicles to telemedicine services entering households across the nation. The pace of AI development signals the direction of modernization.

According to ABI Research, artificial intelligence applications are projected to save the global healthcare industry approximately $52 billion by 2021. The report notes that while AI applications have not yet achieved large-scale commercial deployment, many industries have already incorporated artificial intelligence into their future development roadmaps.

Nowadays, the applications of artificial intelligence in the medical field are countless. What improvements will AI bring to the healthcare industry in the future? VCBeat (WeChat Official Account: vcbeat) has compiled relevant materials from foreign media and listed three ways AI might improve healthcare in 2019.

Telemedicine can address the issue of inadequate medical services in remote mountainous areas by bridging the gap between rural patients and advanced urban medical centers, thereby reducing both the time costs for patients seeking care and high hospital admission rates.

Although telemedicine is in its nascent stage, a research report by Market Research Future projects that the industry will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.5% from 2017 to 2023. With this growth, healthcare providers such as physicians will be able to leverage AI tools to remotely care for their patients, whether from home or from clinical settings.

AI can classify patients and provide corresponding care recommendations, assisting healthcare providers in making more accurate diagnoses. Virtua Memorial Hospital in New Jersey, USA, has already implemented an AI-enabled remote care system to manage patients at risk of respiratory depression. This system alerts caregivers to apply specific interventions for patient care. Furthermore, this AI system effectively identifies all patients at risk of respiratory depression, reducing the misdiagnosis rate by 90%.

If healthcare providers can accept and trust the virtual information provided by AI, it will help them assess the severity of patients' conditions and determine the priority of treatment.

On gold-standard datasets, highly sensitive specialized algorithms trained can help clinicians screen for pathologies.

At the recent European Respiratory Society International Congress, a report indicated that artificial intelligence has been able to assist physicians in accurately interpreting respiratory symptoms and providing appropriate diagnostic and treatment recommendations. Similarly, two large hospitals in Belgium have already implemented AI software to refine their diagnostic processes. As one physician stated, “Artificial intelligence has improved our work efficiency and reduced the rate of misdiagnosis.”

Artificial intelligence has learned a vast amount of medical knowledge and can reach every doctor. However, it does not replace doctors but rather provides them with more comprehensive "second opinions."

The most evident benefit that patients and healthcare professionals derive from AI lies in its ability to consolidate data from multiple sources, provide predictive analytics, and offer personalized diagnostic recommendations and disease risk assessments.

AI can integrate patients’ genetic testing data with electronic health records to provide timely recommendations and alerts to care teams. In 2017, the FDA approved 23andMe’s launch of the first direct-to-consumer test that provides users with genetic risk information for celiac disease. AI can combine this genetic information with patients’ health records of chronic bloating or vomiting to help physicians assess the likelihood of celiac disease.

As technology advances, AI technologies will become increasingly mature. In the future, AI will play a pivotal role in the healthcare sector. However, the application of these AI technologies in clinical practice cannot replace physicians in independently completing all care processes; rather, it requires adoption and endorsement by physicians and other healthcare professionals. By leveraging these assistive tools, physicians can enhance work efficiency, thereby enabling the delivery of high-quality medical services to a larger patient population.