This issue of Industry Insights will lead you to understand the application of artificial intelligence in the medical industry, focusing on its application in patient treatment and operations, artificial intelligence as a prevention tool, and how large hospitals currently use artificial intelligence. The future era of smart medical care has quietly arrived.
Application of Artificial Intelligence in Patient Care and Facility Operations
Artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize the future of medical care. As artificial intelligence becomes integrated into the work of medical professionals and hospital systems, patient outcomes and hospital operational efficiency are expected to change dramatically.
Improve treatment effect
Medical staff need to make dozens of critical decisions about patient treatment every day through patient consultations, laboratory test results, imaging scans and other methods. In the future, it is expected that artificial intelligence will be used more widely to scan this data, compare it with thousands of other cases, and then provide diagnosis and treatment options.
Experts believe that this concept does not mean that artificial intelligence will replace doctors, but that doctors will use artificial intelligence to assist their own diagnostic decisions to maximize accuracy and speed up patient recovery. So what's the result? We have found that artificial intelligence assistance not only improves the success rate of treatment plans but also improves patient outcomes.
Efficient operation
Hospitals must predict patient demand, patient flow and required resources on a daily basis and develop strategies based on past operations. The complexity of hospital operations often prevents hospitals from predicting these factors with complete accuracy, resulting in situations where there are no recent patient appointments, patient wait times are too long, or medical staff are understaffed.
So it’s no surprise that hospitals are turning to artificial intelligence to help. Artificial intelligence will be used to build simulation models based on historical patient volumes, appointment types, average arrival times and specific service durations. These models will be used to provide highly accurate real-time recommendations for ideal patient flow decisions, improving patient consultation experience and patient outcomes by providing sufficient consultation time. Through improved planning, the hospital can receive more patients every day and reduce patient waiting times by up to 50%.
Artificial intelligence as a prevention tool
There are already countless applications of artificial intelligence in patient care, and experts predict that artificial intelligence will also be used to help doctors diagnose and treat various diseases and injuries. Another widespread medical use of AI is in preventive care. There are already many exciting examples of AI being used by researchers as an early prevention intervention tool; for example, AI is being used to catch Type 1 diabetes, identify indicators of Alzheimer’s disease, and predict breast cancer.
Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are using artificial intelligence to tackle cardiovascular disease, the most common cause of death worldwide. Their machine, RiskCardio, is designed to determine the risk of death in patients at high risk for cardiovascular disease. RiskCardio monitors a patient's electrocardiogram (ECG) signal and can identify a patient's risk category within 15 minutes. Physicians can use RiskCardio's analysis to tailor treatments that are more consistent with patients' individual risk levels, thereby increasing the likelihood of treatment success.
Artificial intelligence can assist in medical decision-making, allowing doctors to achieve better treatment results for patients through early prevention and correct diagnosis. As the integration of artificial intelligence into the medical industry matures, the next step will be for artificial intelligence to develop from the research stage to practical applications.
How large hospitals are leveraging artificial intelligence
Research shows that the application of artificial intelligence in the medical industry has unlimited possibilities. The question now is “When will it happen?” In fact, major hospitals are already embarking on plans to deploy artificial intelligence in patient treatment and operations.
Hospital decisions are moving from being based on descriptive analytics (i.e., “what happened”) to predictive analytics using artificial intelligence, or “what would have happened.” There are many things that can be achieved with predictive analytics. The first is the processing of health data by artificial intelligence to help provide more accurate diagnosis and treatment plans. The second is to use health trackers to monitor patients' conditions remotely to create a more personalized experience (imagine a mobile electrocardiogram device that can detect arrhythmias in patients miles away from the hospital).
Predictive analytics are also being used to monitor patient flow. For example, the Johns Hopkins hospital system in the United States recently launched a command center that uses predictive analytics to help make all daily decisions and achieve efficient hospital operations. The result is more efficient and timely management of patient flows, with a reported 60% increase in patient admission rates for complex cases, while also improving resource utilization.
Hospitals are also fully testing and expanding the use of chatbots. These AI-based applications can manage more routine query work through automation. Researchers at UCLA Medical Center are at the forefront of this effort, having built a virtual interventional radiologist (VIR) prototype that allows patients to quickly get FAQs about their radiology treatments and next steps. answer.
With the advent of predictive analytics, health tracking, chatbots and future solutions, hospitals using artificial intelligence will save millions of dollars every year.