Why it is absolutely right to adopt Artificial Intelligence #AI in healthcare?

It has been a while since we witnessed a real revolution in the healthcare industry that can be considered a mega-change. We saw some incremental improvements, and unfortunately, drawbacks in the ecosystem that accounts for around 10% of the world's GDP, 7.2$ trillion of the world's global spending is for healthcare. Despite the spending, here are some facts:

1) Despite the spending, and shockingly enough, a considerable chunk of this amount, 30-50%, is wasted on non-value added categories (1). For example, spending on fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA) in medical claims, spending on services that lack evidence; inefficiencies in the provision of care; and costs incurred while treating avoidable medical injuries.

2) 50% of the world's population lack access to essential health services while 100 million are pushed into extreme poverty because of health expenses(2). This is especially true in many low and middle-income countries where getting treated became a privilege that only the few can afford.

3) The world will be in shortage of 14.5 million healthcare worker by 2030 (physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other) (3). This is a growing workforce crisis that leaves patients untreated, waiting longer while compromising the overall safety and quality of care.

4) Healthcare workers are significantly more exposed to mood disorders, anxiety disorders, sleep disorders, and all psychiatric disorders more than other workers (4). They're stressed, feeling overwhelmed, and enforced to spend 35% of their time documenting things(5) instead of focusing on the care of patients.

5) 42 million patients are exposed to harm and adverse events each year during their hospital stay according to WHO (6). Compare the safety of healthcare with the aviation industry to understand the huge gap. Actually, I lost my father due to a medical error and a delay in early intervention, may his soul rest in peace.

Healthcare of today, in part, failed to deliver on the promise of keeping people healthy with "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."

Many researchers, technology experts, and healthcare leaders believe that wider adoption of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, in healthcare, could be a game changer and a disruptive movement to the industry by solving some of the challenges we are facing today and highlighted above, what could be worse?. For myself, I prefer to believe that AI would augment, support, and transform the industry. AI will learn from the knowledge and wisdom of the thousands of years of practice of medicine, making this knowledge available widely, and hopefully, in an easier way to access than before. I'm optimistic about the involvement of machines in medicine provided that we galvanized ourselves and advanced the adoption around ethical use cases of AI.

Let's work on Artificial Intelligence solutions and use cases that solve real problems, widen the access to the healthcare, tackle the shortage in the healthcare workforce, augment the clinical knowledge, minimize the documentation time, provides safer clinical care and outcomes, and minimize the non-value added administrative tasks.

Let's envision a future that machines, algorithms, and robots work to help the healthcare to be a better, safer, and more efficient industry.

We, at www.TachyHealth.com , work to solve some of the healthcare problems using ethical Artificial Intelligence algorithms.