The word ‘artificial intelligence (AI Technology) conjures up mental visions of futuristic-looking robots for many individuals, making our lives simpler through realistic emotions and behaviours. Unfortunately, Rosie, the Robot, is not rolling through the door any time soon, as much as we would all love to have an animatronic housekeeper.
The truth is that through a carefully balanced collaboration of human judgment and data-driven research, AI technology makes our lives simpler in several ways.
Our online interactions are more personalized and tailored to our desires than ever before, with AI’s assistance. Since businesses are programming chatbots to answer the most commonly asked questions, we no longer have to call a customer service phone line and wait on hold for 15 minutes. And the health care industry is being revolutionized right before our very eyes because of AI technology.
Anything to fear is not an emerging technology. In reality, whether we think about it or not, all of us are exposed continuously to modern approaches to medicine. As of 2017, more than 75% of U.S. hospitals communicate remotely with patients and practitioners via technology, according to the American Hospital Association. In terms of background, in 2010, the number was 35%.
While face-to-face interaction between a doctor and a patient leads to illuminating discoveries that can be facilitated by video chat, it pales compared to what can be discovered via data.
Wearable AI-enabled devices can capture and track data, communicate with patients, and report all these findings to a doctor in real-time. Today, a slick-looking and fashion-forward wristwatch will, among other things, search for erratic or irregular heart rate rhythms, catch an electrocardiogram effortlessly and sense when its wearer falls.
Earlier disease identification is an important way AI technology is strengthening our health care system. The Google Brain Initiative researchers have implemented deep learning techniques to create a self-optimizing algorithm that can automatically diagnose diabetic eye disease through images, a subset of machine learning, a form of AI.
With more than 128,000 images tested by humans, the algorithm was equipped to display distinct disease levels. The severity of the given grade is compared repeatedly for each image with what is known about the more extensive training set before the algorithm can evaluate each image severity in the group.
But this algorithm has never been designed to substitute a doctor, as the American Academy of Ophthalmology points out. The aim is to get possible issues to a doctor earlier, quicker, or in a better light for that use case and countless others so that medical care can occur at the hands of a competent physician.
In breast cancer, AI technology allows mammograms to be analyzed and translated 30 times faster and with 99% precision. Not only is that degree of accuracy medically relevant, but it can also underline the devotion of the health care community to patient-centred care by alleviating needless fear and painful biopsies induced by false-positive mammograms.
AI also provides a way to achieve cost savings and boost physician practice owners and hospital systems efficiencies. AI technology depends on the information at its heart, and that information can be used to evaluate anything from patient census numbers to expenditures. It can also be used to remove the organizational bottlenecks that clinicians have encountered during the ongoing pandemic.
Although Covid-19 is a virus requiring expediency, many health care systems have become bogged down with non-collaborative means of communication, such as fax and email, resulting in a delay in response. But faxes could have been easily classified with the right machine learning and AI technology in place, minimizing the amount of time it took for employees to parse through each letter and discern which fax was legit and which was the junk mail equivalent.
The random pizza menu fax received by a doctor’s office is harmless, but not all spam is innocent. In pursuit of whatever it is they are after, fraudsters can and do) pursue any means possible to penetrate a perceived vulnerability, including patient-protected health information. That’s why some businesses have switched to AI as a security solution, including Boston Children’s Hospital, whose patient records were targeted by hackers.
It’s important to reinforce that AI technology is still in its infancy or the AI we see today. This is just the beginning of AI’s use in health care. There is still so much room for creativity and technologies that health care providers can apply to improve people’s lives.
