Can AI in healthcare prevent emergencies at home

By Dr. Rohit Sharman, CEO & Founder, Zini.Ai

Artificial intelligence (AI) is swiftly entering health care and serving key roles, from automating hard work and routine errands in medical practice to managing patients and medical resources. AI increases the ability for healthcare professionals to better understand the day-to-day patterns and needs of the people they care for, and with that understanding they are able to provide better feedback, guidance and support for staying healthy. Every year, roughly 400,000 hospitalized patients suffer preventable harm, with 100,000 deaths. In light of that, the promise of improving the diagnostic process is one of AI’s most exciting healthcare applications.

AI is by now being used to identify diseases, such as cancer, more precisely and in their early stages. According to the American Cancer Society, a high proportion of mammograms yield false results, leading to 1 in 2 healthy women being told they have cancer. The use of AI is enabling review and translation of mammograms 30 times faster with 99% accuracy, reducing the need for unnecessary biopsies. People are slowly becoming aware of Virtual agents and AIs like SIRI, Alexa and Cortana etc.  Also, the new generation of doctors is more tech-friendly.

Millions of people in rural areas have their nearest hospital more than 100 km away while many in cities have a lot of hospitals but then they have to wait hours to get a 2 minute appointment. 57.3% of medical practitioners in India as per a government study are not even graduates. They are quacks. Where do patients go now? They make do with whatever is available at hand; they go to a chemist or worse a quack for medical advice.Embedding AI algorithms within healthcare information systems can be beneficial because of its potential to improve patient outcomes, especially in busy departments such as the emergency department

Current doctor patient ratio in the country is – 1:11,000 vs. the needed 1:1000 as per WHO. In addition, still people are misled in many parts by unlicensed quakes. Furthermore, adding 1 new human doctor to the workforce requires a minimum of 10+ years of time and more than 300,000 USD (or > 2 Crores INR) worth of money along with constant retraining and infrastructure upgrades. Using an AI chatbot that is trained using legit medical data can not only bridge the gap between the demand and supply of Medical guidance but also reduce this time and monetary cost massively. Using pattern recognition to identify patients at risk of developing a condition or seeing it deteriorate due to lifestyle, environmental, genomic, or other factors – is another area where AI is beginning to take hold in healthcare.

AI solves the problems of Access, Affordability and Awareness (the 3 A’s) to a great extent. In addition, seamlessly storing and transferring structured Medical information (data) between patients, doctors and healthcare organizations is done using AI nowadays. AI in healthcare also makes it easy and to some extent automates the process of Medical coding and makes it easy for Insurance companies and hospitals to coordinate on cases, and can reduce patient’s visits and in so doing reduces costs for both the provider and payer in healthcare domains. In addition, AI has attracted the attention of researchers, physicians, technology and program developers, and consumers in various fields in terms of its potential for transformative innovations in treating human diseases and public health.

According to the World Health Organization, 60% of factors related to individual health and quality of life correlate to lifestyle factors, such as exercise, diet, sleep, stress reduction, substance and medication abuse, and/or recreation. There are reports to suggest that AI could potentially add USD 957 billion (or 15% of current gross value added) to the Indian economy by 2035, and investment in AI in the Indian healthcare industry appears to be growing. Therefore, AI as it is used in healthcare in India appears to be addressing issues of economic disparity rather than widening existing gaps as feared. Healthcare sector in India has a lot of opportunities to grow and to help a lot of people.