Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Benefits & Use Cases

Only by looking at how modern hospitals and healthcare systems manage medical data a doctor from the early twentieth century will be astounded by the changes in the medical system.

There was the good old-fashioned pen and paper back then, where doctors would normally write the symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments given to patients. So, how has it changed through the years? The answer is simple, artificial intelligence in healthcare happened. 

This technology has progressed from a future promise to an inevitable reference point for innovation in the last several years. Not only does it make headlines daily, but the number of AI-related studies, research projects, university courses, and businesses has expanded tremendously.

Equally important, AI has also emerged as a powerhouse in the healthcare sector. According to a recent survey by Business Wire, the investments in artificial intelligence for healthcare will surpass 34 billion dollars by 2025! The COVID-19 pandemic has further enhanced the benefits of AI. 

In this article, we will explore the role of AI in healthcare.

Why Is Artificial Intelligence Important In healthcare?

AI applications are autonomous, just like humans. They simulate human behavior in many ways, such as making decisions and performing tasks independently. There is an added benefit to using AI apps—they can work way faster than humans. Thus, AI healthcare use cases reduce the time and cost of medical tasks.

There can be numerous use cases of AI use cases in healthcare. These include the diagnosis of diseases, medical imaging, patient care, medication allocation, healthcare research, surgery, pandemic spread prediction, and many more.

Especially the way it has played a role against COVID-19, we can see a shining future of artificial intelligence in the medical sector.

What Are The Benefits Of AI in Healthcare?

Artificial intelligence has found a permanent place in the healthcare industry because of its surreal abilities. Discover the benefits of artificial intelligence in healthcare that fueled its fire below:

Real-Time Data

Acquiring reliable information in a timely manner is a vital component in diagnosing and treating medical disorders. Doctors and other medical professionals use AI to accelerate and optimize important clinical decision-making by leveraging real-time and precise data.

More quick and realistic findings can lead to better preventative measures, cost savings, and patient wait times.

Real-time analytics can aid in the improvement of physician-patient relationships. Making crucial health data available via mobile devices can help patients participate in their treatments. Doctors and nurses can be notified of critical changes in patient statuses and crises via mobile notifications.

Streamline Tasks

Artificial intelligence in medicine has already altered healthcare procedures around the world. Appointment scheduling, clinical details translation, and patient history monitoring are examples of innovations. 

AI is allowing healthcare institutions to automate time-consuming and delicate activities. Intelligent radiology equipment, for example, can discover crucial visual indicators, saving hours of intensive investigation. There are also automated systems for appointment scheduling, patient tracking, and care suggestions.

One specific duty that AI has simplified is insurance evaluation. AI is utilized to reduce the expenses associated with insurance claim denials. Health practitioners use AI to detect and fix incorrect claims before insurance companies refuse reimbursement. 

Save Time And Resources

As more critical activities are automated, physicians have more time to examine patients and identify sickness and disease. AI is speeding up procedures to save valuable production hours. 

Because time equals money in every industry, AI has the potential to save significant amounts of money. It eliminates administrative burdens, such as filing, evaluating, and settling accounts, which contribute to a large percentage of these wasteful expenditures. 

Improve Research Quality

One cannot neglect the research domain when scribbling down artificial intelligence benefits in healthcare. AI enables researchers to collect vast amounts of data from various sources.

The capacity to rely on a vast and expanding corpus of knowledge paves the way for more effective examination of dangerous illnesses. In terms of real-time data, research can profit from the vast amount of accessible information.

Medical research organizations such as the Childhood Cancer Data Labare developing valuable tools to help medical practitioners explore large volumes of data. 

AI has also been used to analyze and diagnose symptoms early in developing a disease. Telehealth systems are being adopted to follow patient progress, retrieve important diagnosis data, and contribute population data to shared networks.

Reduce Stress & Anxiety

More than half of primary care doctors are pressured by deadlines and other job factors. AI aids in the streamlining of procedures, the automation of activities, the quick sharing of data, and the organization of operations, all of which relieve medical personnel of the burden of juggling too many jobs.

What Are Examples Of Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare?

Let’s look at the top eight artificial intelligence use cases in healthcare.

• Disease Diagnosis

In the list of applications of AI in healthcare, the top one is disease diagnosis. An adequate diagnosis of illnesses requires years of medical training. Even then, diagnostics is a difficult and time-consuming task.

With this in mind, the demand for expertise in many disciplines considerably outnumbers the available supply. As a result, it strains clinicians and frequently delays life-saving patient diagnoses.

Last year, scientists at Babylon, a worldwide tech business focused on digital health, discovered a novel approach to utilize machine learning to identify the illness. They created new AI symptom checkers in the hopes of reducing diagnosis errors in primary care. The new method solves the limitations of previous versions by incorporating causal reasoning into machine learning. 

Moreover, researchers and application developers have worked on utilizing AI in early cancer detection. By using AI’s pattern recognition, doctors can diagnose cancer at an early stage. These tools can help to reduce cancer’s impact on patients, helping in better treatment and recovery. 

• Medical Imaging

Imaging is another well-known AI application in healthcare. It is also moving away from its primary focus—diagnosis—to playing an important role in therapy, particularly in the field of cancer.

Doctors are starting to rely on imaging to help them monitor tumors and the spread of cancer cells. It educates them on if medicines are functioning better and faster. 

That new role for imaging is changing the sorts of treatments patients receive and dramatically increasing the information physicians receive about their functioning. Ultimately, they make better decisions about what treatment alternatives they require.

Top applications of AI in medical imaging include cardiovascular imaging, lung imaging, neurological imaging, and breast imaging. These applications not only help in the early diagnosis of diseases but also assist in continuous monitoring and adaptive treatment. Most medical imaging software involves deep learning solutions. 

In simpler words, clinicians may discover diseases considerably faster, boosting early action by using artificial intelligence in medical imaging. To put an emphasis, Tulane University researchers showed that AI could identify and diagnose colorectal cancer as well as or better than pathologists by analyzing tissue images.

The goal of this study was to investigate if artificial intelligence can help pathologists keep up with the increased demand for their services.

• Medical Research and Development

Scholars are leveraging AI to analyze and detect patterns in vast and complicated datasets in a timely manner; hoping to achieve precision within seconds.

It also aids them in searching the scientific literature for relevant research and merging various types of data; for example, as assistance in drug discovery and development.

The Institute of Cancer Studies' canSAR database combines genetic and clinical data from patients with information from scientific research, and it uses AI to identify new cancer treatment targets. Researchers have created Eve, an AI 'robot scientist' aimed to make drug development more efficient and cost-effective. 

Another benefit of Ai in healthcare includes medical research. It assists in the matching of suitable individuals to clinical investigations.

For instance, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, AI has assisted biomedical scientists in the research and development of vaccination. CORD-19 is an open-source research dataset that has been used in more than 100,000 research papers to accelerate the pace of discovery. 

• Surgery

One of the fascinating examples of artificial intelligence in healthcare happens to be surgery. AI assists surgeons in performing life-critical operations with excellent precision. You might have watched a crazy video of a surgeon using an AI tool during an operation, right? That will be the norm soon. 

Furthermore, AI can help in analyzing old data to find new surgical methodologies! This is an amazing favor of Artificial Intelligence for healthcare professionals.

• Patient Care

There are numerous artificial intelligence applications in healthcare for patient care, such as patient support virtual assistants. These can provide virtual nursing and psychological help and answer quick questions. 

Another similar application is AI-based telemedicine which assists patients virtually. Furthermore, the need for telemedicine has increased tremendously during COVID-19 as we want to avoid physical encounters.

AI researchers are using machine learning algorithms to study patients’ historical data. This way, healthcare professionals provide patients with customized care using pattern recognition.

Moreover, software development companies are integrating AI and IoT to provide smart health devices. Such devices can monitor the patient’s heart rate, diagnose potential issues, and alert healthcare providers in case of any issues.

• Healthcare Business Management

AI has played a vital role in healthcare business management. This disruptive technology has automated many administrative tasks increasing ROI for the healthcare industry. I’ll give two examples:

First, healthcare apps can help doctors, nurses, and other providers save time on tasks. For instance, artificial intelligence examples in healthcare, such as voice-to-text transcriptions, could help order tests, prescribe medications, and write chart notes. 

Second, Harrow Council is testing the IBM Watson Care Manager system in order to improve cost efficiency. It connects patients with a care provider that meets their requirements while staying within their care budget. It also creates personalized care plans and promises to provide insights into better use of care management resources. 

• Pandemic Prediction

The Covid-19 pandemic has fuelled the need for artificial intelligence in healthcare. Everyone has faced and fought this pandemic in their capacity. Along with health workers and biochemists, AI researchers have been among the front-runners against coronavirus. They explored the practicality of artificial intelligence benefits in healthcare and yielded fruitful outcomes. 

Machine learning models assist researchers and healthcare practitioners in analyzing large volumes of data to find interesting patterns. These patterns forecast the spread of COVID-19. 

Such ML-based early warning systems are helping the general population, healthcare providers, and governments devise countermeasures against the virus.

• Patient and Consumer-Facing Applications

There are presently several applications on the market that employ AI to provide personalized health evaluations and home care recommendations. The app Ada Health Companion uses AI to run a chatbot that integrates the user's symptoms with other data to suggest a probable diagnosis. 

A comparable app, GP at Hand, created by Babylon Health, is presently being tested by a number of NHS surgeries in London.

Future Of Healthcare

Ai in healthcare is utilized or tested for a variety of objectives, including illness diagnosis, chronic condition management, health service delivery, and drug development.

Frequently Asked Questions

What problems can AI solve in healthcare?

There are many problems that artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially solve in healthcare, including

• Analyzing medical images: AI algorithms can be trained to analyze medical images, such as X-rays and MRIs.
• Predictive analytics: AI can be used to analyze large amounts of data, including electronic health records and medical research, to identify trends and predict outcomes.
• Personalized medicine: AI can be used to create personalized treatment plans.
• Administrative tasks: AI can be used to automate administrative tasks, such as scheduling appointments and processing insurance claims, freeing up time for healthcare providers to focus on patient care.
• Drug discovery and development: AI can analyze chemical compounds and speed up the drug discovery process.
• Assistive technologies: AI can be used to develop technologies, such as virtual assistants, that can help patients manage their health and connect with healthcare providers remotely.

What is the future of AI in healthcare?

The future of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is likely to involve even more widespread use of AI technologies to assist with a variety of tasks, including diagnosis, treatment planning, drug discovery and development, and administrative tasks.

AI may also develop new assistive technologies and tools to help patients manage their health and connect with healthcare providers remotely.

How will AI change the healthcare industry?

AI will bring value by automating or supplementing physicians' and staff's jobs. Many monotonous processes will be totally automated, and we will be able to employ AI to help health professionals perform better at their professions and enhance patient outcomes.

How is AI transforming healthcare?

In the healthcare and life sciences industries, artificial intelligence is driving enormous improvement and innovation. AI is hastening progress in medication research and development. It enables better and faster diagnosis. It also allows for significantly more efficient company procedures.

That's significant, given how many of us stand to gain from it. Healthcare is definitely one of the domains where AI has the most potential.