Healthcare faces huge challenges with increased lifestyle-related diseases, a growing population, and the global pandemic. Healthcare spending is rising, but unfortunately, individual health outcomes are lower. This calls for a shift in efficiency so resources are directed better toward patient care.
Artificial Intelligence can use cutting-edge automation to take on different tasks to lower costs, deliver better healthcare faster, and free up health professionals and clinicians so they can focus their efforts on treatment. Many industries are using AI to automate repetitive tasks, helping reduce costs and personalize the customer experience. The same is true for health care as they implement this 4th industrial revolution. There are many excellent AI companies to invest in the health sector.
Let’s take a look at the latest AI and healthcare industry trends.
Trend #1: Wearable Health Monitoring
Thanks to wearables and personal devices, technology allows us to identify, treat and monitor disease at home. This uses machine learning and AI together, lifting the burden off hospitals and clinics because there is real-time monitoring for things like:
- Heart rate
- Body temperature
- Glucose levels
- Blood pressure
- Monitor health and fitness activity
- Accidental falls
These wearables come in many forms, including smartwatches, VR headsets, smart jewelry and blue tooth headsets, and more detection and monitoring are being developed to enhance this AI technology.
Trend #2: Management And Administration
Significant administrative work goes on in every doctor’s office, clinic and hospital, and this takes lots of work hours to keep up to date. This work can be done through AI-powered software to optimize the use of healthcare professionals.
Streamlining data collection and storage is a game changer for the healthcare industry, and more time can be spent on patient care by automating these repetitive tasks.
Trend #3: Diagnostic And Visual Data
Early detection of disease is key to helping patients. AI technology can scan through large amounts of patient imagery to find early warning signs of various deceases, leading to better and more effective treatment. Diagnosis prediction is also achieved through machine learning by capturing underlying patient relationships, like existing conditions or age.
This is made possible because of the progress of electronic health records that can be cataloged and fed into databases across various hospitals and medical facilities.
Trend #4: Electronic Health Records
When doctors meet with patients, they typically take notes which are then transferred digitally to compile and track a patient’s medical journey through the years. This network of data can be used to monitor medical histories, immunizations, laboratory data and different demographics and, with the use of AI and machine learning, provide better communication and shared information to medical providers through various devices like computers, tablets and smartphones.
Trend #5: Robot-Assisted Surgery
This may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it is a reality and will only expand. Robot-assisted surgery allows for complex procedures performed by doctors with more precision and control and less invasive surgery through small incisions.
High-quality training data enables robotic surgery to be faster and safer, with less blood loss, less scarring and fewer complications. Here are a few of the current robot-assisted procedures done now:
- Prostate surgery
- Heart surgery
- Gynecologic surgery
- Colorectal surgery
- Kidney surgery
- Head and neck surgery
- Joint surgery
- Gastrointestinal surgery
- Gallbladder surgery
As the field advances, more AI robotic surgery will take place and assist in better patient outcomes.
Trend #6: Telemedicine
Telemedicine is developing to provide health care solutions to patients separated by distance. This means through the use of AI chatbots, and people can get a hospital level of treatment while they are at home.
Triage is a vital part of medical care. It serves as a preliminary assessment of patients to determine their condition’s urgency and the treatment’s need and nature. From here, telemedicine also connects patients with doctors and nurses to have a remote appointment through a streaming device. AI assists doctors in providing data-driven, real-time decisions and allows for a better capacity to treat patients and manage illness while avoiding or reducing employee fatigue.
Virtual nursing assistants also better manage the healthcare needs of patients by using natural language processing to understand questions from patients and give more accurate answers based on their electronic records.
AI is a relatively new technology that works well in assisting and managing healthcare. It can improve the care given by humans and machines and has great potential to revolutionize the industry. The secret is in adopting it into daily clinical practice, so medical professionals must embrace the use of AI and work alongside it in harmony for the betterment of their patients.