A disruption or positive shift is either occurring or will occur fairly soon in health care. It’s being fueled by Artificial Intelligence, which is a buzz word, but also a real tool.
The size of the market is huge and attractive. The inefficiency born out of the current system provides plenty of opportunity and must also be enticing for new players to enter the market. And, perhaps all can agree that there is some question as to our progress towards the overall goal of health care, which is making people healthier.
What if the big tech companies, with all their insight into our lifestyle choices and all of the health data accumulating on our phones and in our online history, started analyzing health trends? What if Alexia, Cortana, or my watch not only reminded me to take a few steps, but also commented on trends in my blood pressure or weight data and correlated these with my diet or mood? What if Alexia wished me good morning
and said, “I notice you’ve been staying up late, watching depressing movies. Why don’t you go hiking this weekend. Call your friends. Talk to somebody other then me….” This sounds funny but not futuristic.
Simpler still and less of a leap; what if the typical questions asked by a doctor or nurse during a routine visit were already answered with real data uploaded from our phones before we arrived? Here’s how active I’ve been, how much I’ve been sleeping, my weight and blood pressure, ect. The improvement isn’t just a gain in efficiency but also accuracy. The accuracy is improved not only based on honesty and memory, but also by averaging multiple points of data. For example, the blood pressure data I measure over time is more representative then what the doctor measures after I’ve been waiting for an hour and a half and am impatient to get back to work
This idea of a disruption was ‘pie in the sky’ talk at this years Ai4 Healthcare, but at the same time, examples of AI producing savings were provided and easy to believe. For now, the key drivers were inefficiency and many of the applications were administrative, but it seems a common target, or grail, is for AI to assist doctors with processing medical image data.