Humans have always used technological innovations to do more physically than nature would otherwise allow. But until recently, technology has been slower in enhancing our decision-making abilities. Artificial intelligence is changing that limitation, and in healthcare that means enabling health professionals from the C-suite to the primary care doctor to make faster and better-informed choices for their patients and businesses.
How can Artificial Intelligence Help Healthcare Professionals?
The source artificial intelligence’s power lies in three words: artificial neural networks. These algorithm-based networks process and analyze billions of points of electronic patient data, clinical data, academic research, and community health information with speed and accuracy that no human being or even a team of people can match.
The conversion of patient files into electronic health records coincides perfectly with advancements in artificial intelligence software. A deep learning artificial neural network can compare a patient’s records and images against millions of others, supplying a depth of analysis otherwise unavailable. Through AI, doctors have access to a virtual healthcare mastermind. And unlike the human brain, which can become overwhelmed by information overload, the more data an AI system processes the better it becomes at making predictions.
AI-supported physician decision making is already directly helping patients with faster diagnoses, reduced misdiagnoses, more precise medical imaging analysis, and creation of proactive patient treatment plans.
How can Artificial Intelligence Help Providers?
AI also benefits healthcare consumers indirectly by giving to providers administrative tools to increase patient reach, improve patient outcomes, and control costs.
- Service line analytics improve population health management by making facility and specialty care more available to underserved communities.
- Predictive analytics find hospital patients at higher risk of complications like susceptibility to facility-acquired infections and post-surgical difficulties. For recently discharged patients, AI-monitored remote patient monitoring devices alert physicians to patient vital sign changes in time to intervene before an unnecessary hospital readmission.
- Benchmarking a hospital’s performance against other hospitals reveals where it is doing well or needs to improve, helpful information in today’s value-based reimbursement environment. And by providing AI-generated performance-based scorecards to physicians, hospitals can help them to become more productive.
Where is Artificial Intelligence Taking Healthcare in the Future?
AI is reaching into facets of healthcare beyond patient benefits, administrative improvements, and cost savings. Deep learning networks support research into new drugs and cancer treatments, check spending patterns to help reduce financial fraud and abuse, and support compliance with federal and state regulations. For example, the availability of patient healthcare outcomes data gives opportunities to providers in quality improvement, risk adjustment, and HEDIS performance.
Artificial intelligence will never replace doctors, nurses, and provider leadership. It can analyze and make suggestions, but it cannot make healthcare decisions because cannot mimic human judgment. But by making the ocean of available electronic healthcare data navigable, AI will continue becoming the invisible-yet-trusted partner for healthcare professionals and the patients they serve.
If you would like more information on healthcare artificial intelligence future developments, we found the following two references helpful:
- Here are Three Ways AI Will Change Healthcare by 2030, by the World Economic Forum; and
- Three Ways AI Will Change Healthcare, by Forbes Magazine.
Reveleer’s platform leverages Intelligent Automation to assist health plans in improving clinical outcomes of their Risk Adjustment and Quality Improvement programs. If you would like to see Reveleer in action, request a product walkthrough today: Click here to request it
