Artificial Intelligence: How Can It Change Healthcare?
Artificial intelligence has become a part of our daily lives. Its impact is clearly visible in many different fields, ranging from business, education, shopping – and even healthcare. In just a few decades, humans came from traditional and old-fashioned medical equipment to the more modern technological advancements.
But it’s not just with medical equipment that artificial intelligence is making an impact. It is also having a positive effect on the administrative aspects of health care, too!
Clinical Decision Support
Clinical decision support provides intelligently filtered person-specific information to enhance health care. Clinical decision support systems are computer programs that help healthcare providers make better decisions. They do this by providing information that helps the provider with particular tasks, as well as making suggestions or recommendations on how to approach the task.
Clinical decision support software has already been implemented in various different areas of healthcare. In recent years, it has been used to improve the quality of care delivered at many different hospitals. It has been especially helpful in acute care settings, such as emergency departments and intensive care units. It has also been used to improve the management of patients with complex and chronic conditions.
Patient Monitoring
One of the biggest challenges for healthcare providers is keeping track of what happens with their patients throughout their hospital stay. Unfortunately, there is no quick way of doing that since it involves manually checking patients’ hospital monitors, medical history, medications, and other relevant information. Artificial intelligence can solve this problem by automatically monitoring specific patients and feeding information back to doctors and nurses.
This type of monitoring is already commonly used in intensive care units. An AI system known as Intelligent Patient Care Assistant (IPCA) monitors patient data in order to detect changes that may require the attention of doctors or nurses.
IPCA performs this type of monitoring for patients in intensive care units who have cardiac or pulmonary issues, sepsis, or neurological disorders. By doing so, it helps healthcare professionals to keep track of those patients who may need more help than others. This system is not just used for automatic monitoring; it also sends alerts when certain abnormal values are detected.
AI-Supported Electronic Health Record Systems
This is one of the first uses of AI in the healthcare system. As patients move from one city to another, they see one doctor then another and they receive treatment in various hospitals. Keeping track of this information and all these changes manually simply isn’t feasible, much less efficient.
Electronic health record systems are a useful tool for healthcare providers. They allow them to keep track of their patients’ medical histories and other relevant information at all times. With an AI-supported electronic health records system, a patient’s health and treatment history follows them wherever they go.
Adverse Drug Event Prediction
According to the National Safety Council, the total number of deaths caused by adverse drug events in the US every year is around 440,000 – which makes it the fourth leading cause of death. The main reason why adverse drug events happen is that healthcare providers often use multiple medications that have similar but not identical side effects and drug interactions. These interactions can be fatal if they are not taken into consideration.
One way to prevent these adverse drug events is by developing software that can predict possible side effects and drug interactions based on patient information and previous observations from other patients. After all, it makes sense that someone who is allergic to penicillin will also be allergic to cephalosporin. There are already some systems that can predict adverse drug events by analyzing patient data and comparing it with drug databases.
Improving Diagnostic Accuracy in Radiology
Some of the current methods used by radiologists to diagnose diseases are quite subjective and require a lot of time to correctly interpret even simple X-rays or MRI images. Artificial intelligence could improve diagnostic accuracy in radiology by analyzing images quickly and accurately, without any human interference.
Some people believe that AI could potentially replace radiologists altogether in the future. However, AI would probably only be used as an assistant rather than a replacement for radiologists because it needs human expertise to decide which images need further analysis or interpretation. Furthermore, radiologists need special training in order to properly use the software and interpret images correctly.
Automating Processes in a Hospital Setting
Automating processes is probably one of the areas where artificial intelligence will have the biggest impact on healthcare in the near future: returning phone calls, taking notes during a consultation, retrieving medical records from storage rooms, etc. All these tasks can be automated using AI, leaving medical professionals with more time to dedicate to their patients – or to themselves.
Improving Caregiver Experience in Hospitals
Another benefit of using artificial intelligence in healthcare is that it can improve the overall experience of hospital staff members. For instance, AI can be used to automatically convert notes from medical records into electronic charts, thus enhancing the overall caregiving experience.
Another interesting example is an AI system that automatically sends clinical reports to caregivers and alerts them when certain values fall outside specific limits. This system can help with things such as pain management, improving health outcomes, and discharge planning.
Takeaway
Artificial intelligence has already been implemented in various areas of healthcare. It has also improved many processes that were once very time-consuming for humans.
In order to fully understand how artificial intelligence will change healthcare, we need to look at some of the biggest challenges faced by medical professionals today and what technologies might be able to help with these challenges. For instance, one of the biggest challenges facing hospitals today is keeping track of what happens with patients during their stay. Artificial intelligence is changing healthcare by implementing systems that automatically monitor these patients and feed relevant data back to doctors or nurses.
Another big challenge is improving diagnostic accuracy. Today’s methods for diagnosing diseases rely heavily on subjective human interpretations of information provided by medical images. Artificial intelligence could improve diagnostic accuracy by analyzing images quickly and accurately, without any human interference.
These are just a few examples of how artificial intelligence is going to change healthcare in the near future. One thing is for sure, the changes and improvements we have seen over the last decades will only continue. The future looks bright for AI in healthcare.