How can Artificial Intelligence Help Health Care?

AI and Machine Learning are giving healthcare providers an unprecedented ability to efficiently organize patient care, automate contracts and payments, and accelerate diagnostics and the treatment development process.

In the last few years, health care providers and insurance underwriters have started to see the power of bringing machine learning to their industry. Now, medical organizations of all sizes are in a scramble to not only reduce bureaucracy but also increase the accuracy of diagnostics and the speed by which patience can be approved for treatment.

Unfortunately, many health care organizations — particularly insurers — are still processing patient case files manually, which can be a laborious and error-prone process. Artificial Intelligence makes it easy for health care providers to bring automated solutions to patient care.

What’s Driving the Urgency to Adopt AI?

High costs of healthcare, particularly diagnostics and drug discovery. • Bureaucratic inefficiencies associated with maintaining patient records and approving treatment plans. • Slow clinical trials • A need for greater physician training.

When Machine Learning Comes to Medicine —

1. Doctors use image recognition technologies to detect disease more easily — and in some cases, automatically.
2. Insurance providers use natural language processing to summarize patient case files and approve treatment plans more quickly.
3. Pharmaceutical companies drastically reduce the time it takes to identify efficacious molecules and bring them to market.
4. Surgeons perform procedures with assistance from robotics and AI.
5. Pharmacists catch dangerous drug interactions early.
6. Patients receive better, more personalized care.

Key Uses for AI in Healthcare

Patient Casefile Processing

Natural Language processing has been a boon for the health care sector. In fact, we’ve already seen several efforts to bring NLP and Optical Character Recognition to the process of sharing, evaluating, and summarizing patient case files.

Traditionally, insurance organizations must approve treatment plans manually. To accomplish this arduous task, medical professionals evaluate patient case files to make a decision. To ensure quality care and limit liability, these files can be hundreds of pages long, containing everything from detailed patient health information to specifics on their insurance coverage.

By imbuing this process with machine learning, health care organizations drastically streamline this process. AI algorithms can automate repetitive tasks and even summarize, in natural human language, the important aspects of a patient’s profile.

Diagnostics and Disease Detection

It seems like every week, researchers are announcing new ways to use image recognition and deep learning for disease detection. So far, AI has been used to detect breast cancer, early-stage Alzheimer’s, pneumonia, eye diseases, bacterial meningitis, and lots of others.

The process of training deep learning models to detect disease can be complex. For example, it can be very difficult to accumulate the necessary dataset of positives to the train the model. By partnering with AI companies, researchers get access to a highly-skilled data science team who can help you throughout the entire research process. In some cases, it can be as simple as outlining your goals of the research project and developers can get to work, building AI-powered solutions that help you gather the data and deploy a diagnostic model.

Pharmaceutical Research

While disease detection typically relies on image recognition models, pharmaceutical research finds patterns in much more complex datasets. Nonetheless, convolutional neural nets have shown so much promise delivering new pharmaceutical molecules, they are now being used at over 150 startups and 40 pharmaceutical companies to support the drug discovery process.

It may surprise you, however, that very few of these organizations have a sufficiently-robust AI team to expediently advance their research. Research organizations should be bringing an army of AI experts and Data Scientists to your most pressing disease treatment challenges.

Personalized Patient Care

There’s nothing more personal than health care. However, as professionals see an ever-increasing number of patients, it’s increasingly difficult to offer personalized care. The good news is that artificial intelligence, combined with analytics and big data, are finally making it possible to deploy customized care, at scale across the entire industry. By deploying big analytics and advanced solutions, these new approaches are leading to higher quality care at lower costs.

Regardless of your company’s size, AI-powered tools can deliver customized care, at scale. These tools can support health care providers at any stage of the process: from interactive customer service agents on the phones to AI-powered doctor assistants in the clinic or pharmacy.

AI-Powered Medical Equipment

Because AI will increasingly play an outsized role in the health care sector, we can expect hospitals and clinics to increasingly turn to medical devices that leverage artificial intelligence. All sorts of devices can be imbued with artificial intelligence to streamline diagnostics and ensure accuracy. The medical equipment manufacturers of the future will identify new ways to power their products with AI.

These examples were derived from Manceps’ AI Services for Healthcare page. Manceps helps enterprise organizations deploy AI solutions at scale — including healthcare providers. We even have a case study on how a healthcare company used NLP.

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