AI has emerged as the perfect assistant that medical professionals have been looking for. Processing volumes of data that would take years to do manually, AI has been instrumental in fast diagnosis. Therefore, AI has facilitated a more preventive approach to treating diseases rather than reacting to them, thus respecting the old adage. Moreover, the use of AI in daily operations at medical facilities has ensured a more personalised service to the patients, thus discarding the one-size-fits-all norm.
Besides helping medical and healthcare professionals with their daily jobs, AI impacts the lives of patients, who now have a better understanding of the disease that ails them. Moreover, AI usage has drastically reduced the costs of hospitalisation and treatment, thus making healthcare more affordable. In this article, let us take a detailed look at how AI has left an indelible mark on how the healthcare industry functions, and how it has benefitted both – the healthcare professionals and the patients.
AI: the paradigm shift in healthcare
AI has fundamentally changed the ways in which healthcare used to function, and in the process introduced more precision and efficacy to the same work. Here is a guide on the ways AI has improved on existing infrastructure:
- Early detection of disease and personalised medicine: AI has the unique ability to process complex text and image data used in medical processes like radiology and interpret them in useful ways. For instance, it can predict the occurrence of diseases like cancer in an individual by matching specific data with other variables that occurred in cancer-related cases. Thus, AI can facilitate early detection of terminal diseases and potentially save lives.
- Automation and personalised medicine: Medical documents do not need to be manually recorded and processed any longer because AI can save medical professionals the trouble. However, AI is not just a tool that can replace manual labour. Using the voluminous data that it processes and analyses, AI-led technology can chart a medical and lifestyle strategy for individuals who match AI’s understanding of their ailment.
- Focus on mental health: Mental health is not well understood by a large populace, and the distress button is not easy to find when an emergency occurs. To deal with such a systemic issue, AI’s skills in big data analysis can come in handy. Not only individuals facing stress, anxiety, or depression-related disorders can be identified but can also be offered help with the help of AI-powered chatbots. Sometimes, all it takes is a moment of empathy, and AI can go a long way in fulfilling this requirement.
- Remote monitoring: Visits to the hospital can be tricky especially if the patients are old. The issue can be substantially mitigated if the patient’s health condition can be regularly monitored. AI can remotely monitor the patient’s health conditions, thus preventing a run against time in case of emergencies, which would be rarely unpredictable in the first place.
- Medical training: Since the doctor-to-patient ratio is really low, medically trained individuals can make a great deal of difference as the first line of intervention. AI can be used to conduct training sessions for individuals, who could imbibe theoretical and practical skills that could be of use in an emergency.
- Development and discovery of new drugs: In the post-covid era, medical R&D has emerged to be more important than ever. The epidemic exposed the need for rapid research based on available data and the deployment of cutting-edge technology for the manufacture of life-saving vaccines. AI can be systematically deployed to identify novel strains of viruses and analyse the data available on them to predict a possible solution for neutralising them. The development of new drugs can thus be expedited, leading to the prevention of panic among the people, and keeping the situation under control at all times.
- Telemedicine and virtual assistance: AI can be of great help when it comes to providing solutions through virtual nursing applications. Thus, those in urgent but not critical need of medical assistance can take recourse to taking advice from the AI assistant. The AI-led virtual assistance feature has been widely used by industries such as NBFCs in providing remote assistance to clients.
Conclusion
To sum up, AI has the ability to rule the online marketplace with the services it renders in easing the manual processes earlier performed by medical professionals. From the discovery of new words to devising medical assistance to individuals, AI could decide who would have a better share of the market. Therefore, investors do not shy away from speculative actions taken in the stock market. Although it sounds risky at the outset, the direct investments that AI has already drawn worldwide only shows the confidence that stakeholders have in it. If used with a little caveat concerning ethical handling of data and data protection, AI can be the next big innovation driving the market in the coming years.