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10 Ways Technology Is Reshaping Healthcare

10 Ways Technology Is Reshaping Healthcare

This blog post explains the differences between augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR).
Healthtech
July 7, 2024
Md. Rabiul Alam Sarker

Rabiul Alam brings a blend of manual and automation expertise to the world of software testing. With a deep understanding of the entire testing life-cycle for dynamic web and mobile applications. His experience spans popular testing frameworks like Selenium, TestNG, and Appium. Additionally, he possesses hands-on knowledge of DevOps tools like Docker, ELK stack, and CI/CD pipelines.

Md. Asad Chowdhury Dipu

AI in the healthcare industry is becoming more advanced and efficient at helping doctors and other healthcare professionals. This growth creates real opportunities for development within the healthcare sector and allows tasks to be done at a lower cost and faster. AI has huge potential in healthcare because it can solve problems that humans can’t handle on their own.

46% of healthcare institutions in the United Kingdom in 2019 were already using AI technology, demonstrating its widespread use. From detecting patterns in patient data to analyzing medical images, artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize how healthcare is provided.

Using AI, healthcare providers can improve patient care, simplify processes, and boost overall efficiency. In this article, we will look at ten amazing benefits of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

How Can AI Benefit The Healthcare Industry?

There are many benefits of using AI in healthcare and medicine. One of the biggest benefits of AI in the healthcare industry is that it can diagnose health issues quickly and accurately. AI algorithms can swiftly and precisely process huge amounts of data, helping medical care professionals diagnose and treat illnesses more efficiently.

AI can help decrease human errors, help doctors and nurses, and offer patient services around the clock. As AI technology advances, it has even more potential to read scans, medical images, and X-rays, diagnose health issues, and create treatment plans.

According to Statista, the AI healthcare market was worth $11 billion in 2021. By 2030, it is expected to grow to $187 billion. This huge increase means we’ll probably see major changes in how hospitals, doctors, biotech firms, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies work. 5G availability, better machine learning algorithms, cheaper hardware, and more access to data have all contributed to the boosted use of AI in healthcare, speeding up these changes.

10 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Modernizing Healthcare

Deep learning and AI technologies are increasingly being used to diagnose heart, skin, and liver diseases. Proper and early diagnosis of these kinds of diseases helps treat patients on time.

Healthcare organizations are using artificial intelligence to make various medical care processes more efficient, from administrative tasks to patient care. Below, we will explain 10 benefits of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

Improving Patient Care

When implemented accurately, artificial intelligence in healthcare can enhance the patient care that is provided. It accomplishes this by reducing time on research, minimizing mistakes, and optimizing resource use. With the rise in popularity of health and fitness monitors, more people are now using health-tracking apps to track and analyze their health data.

Patients can share their health data with their clinicians to monitor health problems and give alerts if problems arise. AI solutions, like deep learning algorithms, big data applications, and machine learning algorithms, could also assist humans in analyzing huge datasets to aid clinical and other decision-making processes.

Healthcare institutions are using artificial intelligence for various purposes. These include identifying severe diseases and assisting people in managing their lifestyles and diseases. Some other purposes of using artificial intelligence by healthcare organizations are given below:

  • Predicting heart transplant rejection rates
  • Drug discovery
  • Monitoring of health and lifestyle by identifying breathing, sleep, and heartbeat patterns
  • Facilitating clinical trials
  • Identifying cancer
  • Providing personalized treatment options
  • Clinical trials
Enhancing Healthcare Diagnoses

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are leading the way in improving medical diagnostics. Tools powered by AI, like image recognition algorithms, help doctors interpret medical images accurately. This not only speeds up diagnosis but also makes the results more reliable.

AI systems can also identify anomalies and subtle patterns in patient data, aiding in early disease detection. For instance, AI tools can detect early signs of chronic diseases such as cancer or diabetes. It allows doctors to step in early and potentially stop the disease from getting worse.

The use of AI in improving early detection and healthcare diagnosis shows how technology can save human lives and enhance patient care. Harvard’s School of Public Health says that even though it’s still early, using AI for diagnosis could cut treatment expenses by up to 50% and boost health results by 40%.

One example comes from the University of Hawaii, where researchers found that deep learning artificial intelligence technology can enhance predictions of breast cancer risk. More research is required, but the lead researcher noted that an artificial intelligence algorithm can get trained on far more radiology images compared to a radiologist—up to a million or more images.

Furthermore, once the algorithm is trained, it can be used again without any cost besides the hardware. An MIT team created a machine learning algorithm to decide when a human professional is required. For some tasks, like detecting an enlarged heart in chest X-rays, they discovered that combining human and AI efforts gave the best outcomes.

Another study showed that AI could detect skin cancer better than expert doctors. Researchers from France, the United States, and Germany used deep learning on over 100,000 images to detect skin cancer. When they compared the AI’s performance to that of 58 international dermatologists, the AI came out on top.

Reducing Costs of Healthcare

Healthcare expenses are a big concern around the world, and AI is helping to lower these costs while using resources better. There are many ways artificial intelligence can lower healthcare costs, both time-wise and financially. Using AI to make medical procedures such as diagnosis more efficient can lead to big cost savings.

For example, AI can quickly look through millions of images for signs of illness. This reduces the need for costly and time-consuming manual work. As a result, fewer patients are required to be admitted to the hospital, and fewer beds and less time are used because patient care becomes more efficient. AI can also examine patient data to find high-risk people who might need more expensive and intensive treatments.

By detecting these people early, hospitals can take preventive steps, potentially lowering the need for costly treatments later on. AI’s ability to reduce medical costs benefits healthcare organizations and makes healthcare more accessible and cheaper for patients. This, in turn, improves the overall healthcare system.

Providing Personalized Treatments

Disease procedures and how people respond to treatments vary based on their behavior, genetics, and physiology. Therefore, it is important to give personalized treatments to every person. AI has made the concept of personalized treatment a key part of healthcare.

By examining a patient’s current health condition, medical history, and genetics, AI can create personalized treatment strategies tailored to the individual’s particular needs. These plans consider a patient’s possible drug interactions, genetic makeup, and other factors that may impact their treatment response.

This approach not only makes therapies more effective but also decreases the chance of adverse reactions. In addition, AI can help create personalized medicines for particular medical conditions during clinical trials.

Analyzing Healthcare Data More Accurately

Artificial intelligence algorithms can analyze large amounts of healthcare data to diagnose diseases early and accurately. It also assists in lowering diagnostic mistakes. Technologies such as cloud computing systems and AI let healthcare experts process more data than on-premise tools. This assists in improving accuracy.

Furthermore, one advantage of using AI in healthcare is that it simplifies gathering and sharing information. AI helps healthcare providers track patient data more efficiently. Take diabetes, for example. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 11.6% of the United States population has diabetes.

People can now use various monitoring devices to monitor their glucose levels and share this feedback with their medical team. AI can help healthcare providers collect, store, and analyze this information and give data-driven insights from many people. Healthcare professionals can use this information to find better ways to treat and manage diseases.

Making Medical Research Easier

Medical research is crucial for advancing healthcare, and AI is speeding up discoveries. AI can analyze large datasets, like scientific literature, genomic information, and clinical records, to find patterns, trends, and potential breakthroughs. One excellent use of AI is detecting potential drug candidates for several diseases.

AI algorithms can study the molecular form of compounds and forecast how effective they might be as treatments. This speeds up the drug discovery procedure, allowing quicker access to new therapies. AI also helps researchers detect patient groups for clinical trials, which makes the recruitment procedure more efficient.

It is especially useful for rare illness research, where finding appropriate participants is tough. The collaboration between artificial intelligence and medical research offers great potential for discovering new treatments, gaining a deeper understanding of diseases, and eventually improving medical care outcomes for patients around the world.

Improving The Healthcare User Experience

A study discovered that 83% of patients say bad communication is the worst part of their medical care experience in 2020. This shows a big necessity for clearer communication between healthcare providers and patients.

AI technologies, such as speech recognition, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and predictive analytics, may assist healthcare providers in communicating better with patients. For example, AI could provide clearer details about a patient’s treatment choices. This helps the healthcare provider have better talks with the patient to make shared decisions.

Making Surgeries Safer

In healthcare robotics, AI is settling its place by providing effective and specialized support to surgeons. When surgeons are more skilled, they can do surgeries that used to need cutting open a patient. Robots boost precision, especially when working in areas near delicate tissues and organs. They reduce the need for extra stitches, the chance of infection, and how bad the patient feels after surgery.

Furthermore, people who have robot-assisted surgery heal faster and have less noticeable scars because of the smaller cuts. At the Maastricht University Medical Center in 2017, doctors successfully sutured blood arteries as thin as .03 millimeters with the help of a robot guided by AI.

The surgeon’s hand movements are translated into precise commands for the robot to execute, and it performs the task accurately. In addition, AI can minimize vibrations to prevent any mistakes during the operation.

Analyzing Medical Images More Efficiently

In the world of medical imaging, artificial intelligence stands out as a valuable partner for healthcare providers. AI algorithms swiftly and accurately analyze intricate medical images like MRIs, X-rays, and CT scans. This implies that pathologists and radiologists can gain from AI’s help in analyzing these images, resulting in quicker and more accurate diagnoses.

AI does not take over human expertise; it improves it. Radiologists can use AI to detect potential anomalies or abnormalities in medical images, which healthcare professionals can then examine further. This combined approach speeds up the diagnostic procedure, lowers the risk of mistakes, and ensures patients get prompt care.

In addition, AI aids in finding trends and patterns in medical imaging data, which is vital for ongoing medical research. It is vital in increasing our knowledge of diseases and improving how we treat them.

Streamlining Administrative Tasks

The administrative workload in medical care can be overwhelming. Tasks like scheduling appointments, managing patient records, handling billing, and processing insurance claims can take up much time and resources. That is where AI steps in to help out.

AI-powered automation makes these administrative tasks easier, cutting down on the workload for healthcare staff and reducing mistakes. For instance, virtual assistants and chatbots can answer common questions and handle appointment scheduling, freeing up healthcare staff for more important work.

Moreover, AI software swiftly and accurately processes insurance claims, decreasing the chance of disputes and delays. This saves time and ensures healthcare providers get paid correctly. This saves time and ensures healthcare providers are paid fairly for their services.

By automating administrative work, AI lets healthcare experts concentrate on patient care, enhancing overall efficiency and the patient experience. Generative AI aids clinicians in summarizing content and taking notes, ensuring detailed medical records are maintained. AI can also aid in correct coding and sharing information between billing and departments.

What Is The Potential and Future of Artificial Intelligence in The Healthcare Industry?

While there are advantages of AI in healthcare, it also has drawbacks. However, AI is mostly viewed as a positive force. It will continue to grow and be used more widely in the future. Artificial intelligence already plays a key role in understanding patient needs via detailed data analysis. 

It offers opportunities to assist in reducing human error, offers 24/7 patient services, and supports medical staff and professionals. As AI tools advance, they could be used more to read scans, medical images, and X-rays, diagnose medical issues, and make treatment plans. AI applications assist in streamlining several tasks. These include answering phones and analyzing health trends in populations.  

For example, future AI tools might augment or automate more of the tasks of healthcare staff and clinicians. This will allow doctors to spend more time on providing more compassionate and effective face-to-face healthcare. Whether you need medical treatment in the future or work in the healthcare sector, you’ll likely see that AI technology has become a normal part of the healthcare environment.

Conclusion

The integration of AI into the healthcare industry has opened up new possibilities. From early disease detection and improving medical diagnostics to transforming drug discovery, AI is revolutionizing the healthcare sector. After reading this article, you may now know the benefits of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

It helps prevent diseases, makes administrative work easier, and empowers both healthcare professionals and patients. If you look at the future of AI in healthcare, the collaboration between artificial intelligence and the healthcare industry will continue to grow.