Rather than replacing human clinicians, AI technologies can assist healthcare professionals with routine tasks. This helps reduce administrative costs for both the facility and the patient.
AI can also automate drudgery, such as analyzing data and scheduling appointments. It can even help with more complex tasks, such as determining how long patients should stay in the hospital.
Improved Patient Care
In healthcare, AI can perform tasks that are typically done by humans – from interpreting genetic codes to powering surgery-assisting robots to automating administrative tasks. This simplifies the lives of patients, doctors and hospital administrators while increasing efficiency, accuracy and cost-effectiveness.
For example, intelligent automation that automatically identifies documentation gaps and enables them to be resolved at the point of care supports accurate quality reporting and efficient downstream revenue cycle processes. Another example is precision medicine, an emerging approach that tailors disease management and prevention options to each patient’s unique characteristics such as lifestyle, environment, genes, and more.
Additionally, AI can help improve medical research and drug discovery by reducing time to market and improving clinical trial results.
Increased Efficiency
The effective use of AI can help reduce operational costs and make the healthcare system more efficient. AI can automate administrative tasks like billing, patient check-ins, and data entry to free up time for medical professionals.
AI can also be used to identify errors in medical records, such as misdiagnoses and incorrect treatments, and help doctors prevent these mistakes in the future. AI can also be used to interpret medical images and detect disease in its early stages, such as in a mammogram, to reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies.
Natural language processing can also allow for the use of an AI to translate doctor’s notes into plain language and provide a better experience for patients. This helps to build a stronger connection between the patient and physician.
Better Patient Outcomes
In addition to helping medical professionals save time with administrative tasks like sifting through records, identifying billing errors and locating documents, AI technology helps improve patient outcomes. This can be accomplished through interpretation of colosal amounts of data, which speeds up diagnoses and treatment plans.
Schibell cites other efficiencies in AI: “AI is speeding up the process of discovery, finding insights that might elude discovery from a physician’s manual efforts.”
Detecting healthcare fraud is another potential benefit of AI. Leading healthcare service providers use AI to scan claims and identify suspicious patterns that could indicate fraud or theft. This allows professionals to investigate and prosecute fraudulent activity faster.
Reduced Risk of Errors
One of the biggest problems with healthcare is medical errors. These errors can lead to serious consequences and even death. However, artificial intelligence can help reduce these errors and make healthcare much safer and more efficient.
Studies have shown that AI can improve patient safety by reducing medication errors. It can also help doctors diagnose patients and provide treatment more quickly. This can save lives and improve overall patient outcomes. It can also reduce the amount of time doctors spend on routine tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex cases and improving staff morale and retention. In addition, AI can help with continuous medical education by analysing the medical literature and recommending new developments to doctors.
Improved Patient Safety
The goal of integrating AI into healthcare is to help improve patient safety by streamlining diagnostics, reducing the risk of errors and making it easier to follow-up with patients. It also allows medical professionals to focus on the patients who need the most attention.
AI can identify patterns in data that may indicate a high risk of an adverse event. This could include healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), adverse drug events, venous thromboembolism, surgical complications, pressure ulcers, falls and insufficient decompensation detection.
AI can also speed up the diagnosis process by identifying disease at earlier and more treatable stages. It can also automate administrative tasks like pre-authorizing insurance, following up on unpaid bills and maintaining records to lighten the workloads of medical professionals.
Improved Healthcare Education
Artificial intelligence can help provide continuous medical education to doctors by analysing the literature and providing them with updates and recommendations for best practices. This will enable them to keep up with new developments in their fields and improve their performance.
Moreover, AI can help prevent the spread of infectious diseases by monitoring public health data and alerting physicians when there are abnormal patterns. This will allow healthcare professionals to better detect and manage outbreaks, resulting in improved patient outcomes and decreased costs.
While expert systems based on variations of ‘if-then’ rules were the prevalent technology for AI in healthcare during the 80s and later periods, they are still widely employed for clinical decision support today. However, this approach is limited in terms of accuracy and integration with existing clinician workflows.
