Artificial Intelligence: The Tech Trend that is Transforming the Healthcare
By Tripti Rai
February 15, 2018 2. min read
Last update on: September 19, 2019

The advent of Healthcare Application Development industry has brought about a change in the once traditional Healthcare industry so much so that what once called for spending big bucks and waiting in long queues, is now getting restricted to the mobile devices.

In today’s medical scenario, the picture has changed. Now-a-days, when your body starts behaving atypically, a smartphone healthcare app, which is run by either a private or a public healthcare organization, will flag it and provide you the first stage of triage: a push to make your life healthier or a direct diagnose to one-off issues like sprains, heartburn, or flu.

When needed, it even gives a referral to a human specialist or GP, saving you a visit to the hospital.

Your medical data, along with others’, will be then stored, integrated, and monitored by the machine-learning algorithms in the cloud, enabling human doctors to pick trends and interactions at a very atomic population level and finally, give you the holy grail of healthcare: prediction and prevention of disease even before it happens.

While a pretty straight forward approach till now, there are three rather disruptive technologies that have already found their way in the Healthcare industry and are now bringing a revolutionary change to it: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Blockchain, Wearable.

In this article, we will look into the first of them, Artificial Intelligence, at length, giving you an idea of how the Healthcare Industry is going to shape up in the coming future. Looking into the ways the technology is going to change the industry and why it’s time you implement Machine Learning in your healthcare mobile apps to mark a place in the industry’s future.

Let’s Begin.

1. Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

AI in medicine and healthcare mixed with mobile applications is helping organize treatment plans and patient routes better, while providing the physicians with all the information they could literally need to come to an informed decision.

Artificial intelligence has already found various applications in the healthcare industry to help revolutionize the domain straight from the designing of treatment process by providing assistance in easing the repetitive jobs to better medication management and drug creation. While this is all just the beginning.

Here are some of the ways AI has been revolutionizing the Healthcare Industry

2. Mining of Medical Records

The most common usage of AI in healthcare is data management. This is the reason why majority of the AI based mHealth apps that are currently prevalent in the industry, offer this feature.

Collecting, storing, normalizing, and then tracing the lineage is the primary step of transforming the present healthcare system – A process that AI helps follow and bring into daily practice.

Recently, Google launched the Google Deepmind Health program, which is now being used to mine data of healthcare records to offer more efficient and faster health related services.

3. Designing of Treatment Plans

IBM Watson recently launched a plan for oncologists, which provides the clinicians a number of evidence based treatment options. The program has the ability to analyze the definition and the context of all the structured and unstructured data in the clinical notes and give out reports that are critical to the selection process followed to finalize a treatment approach.

While IBM Watson for Oncology is a very high level application of the AI technology, there are mobile apps that do the same: analyze data and generate reports that help define the treatment pathway.

4. Assisting in Repetitive Jobs

Healthcare is now moving towards the world of Cognitive Assistants who come with reasoning, analytical capabilities, and a complete range of medical knowledge. IBM recently launched an algorithm, Medical Sieve that has been stated qualified to provide assistance in decisions related to cardiology and radiology.

The cognitive health assistant, as Medical Sieve is coined as, analyzes the radiology images to then spot and detect issues faster and with more reliability.

Medical Sieve is just one example. There are other technologies as well, like Enlitic, which aim to mix deep learning with medical data for aiding advance diagnostic and for improving patient outcomes.

5. Changing online and in-person Consultations Outlook

Babylon App is the working example of how AI can change Doctor Consultations. The app offers medical consultation and health care services online. The app provides medical AI advice on the basis of patient’s medical history and the available medical knowledge.

These AI based apps work in a way that the users only have to report the symptoms of their illness and the app then checks the symptoms against the database of the diseases using the speech recognition method. Then, after noting patient’s history and their circumstances, they offer a course of action that the patient should take.

The growing popularity and need of Healthcare Apps that store data and generate reports on the basis of the AI technology is visible from the fact that over 54% mHealth app users are willing to engage with AI and Robotics for their medical consultation needs.

AI aiding Consultation - PWC Survey

Apps like these, when developed rightly with the help of an informed Healthcare application development company, not only assist patients in managing their health but also helps lower the waiting room crowd and wait time.

6. Medication Management and Health Assistance

Sense.ly, a medical startup developed the world’s first digital nurse, Molly a few months back. The virtual nurse has an amicable face and comes with a pleasant voice and her only goal is to monitor the condition and treatment of patients. The mobile app uses machine learning for supporting patients that having chronic conditions when in-between doctors’ visits.

The app provides tested, customized monitoring and the follow up care, with a focus on chronic diseases.

By being present to inform patients of when to take medications and then monitoring if they did, while monitoring their health, has made AI a very important technology when it comes to Health Assistance and Management of Medication.

7. Drug Creation

Creation of pharmaceuticals using clinical trials can take more than a decade and even costs billions. Introducing AI to drug creation, don’t just make the process faster but also extremely cost effective.

Atomwise is one such network that make use of supercomputers, which roots out therapy from the databases of molecular structure. Last year, Atomwise used its AI technology to find out the existing medicines in the market, which could be redesigned for treating Ebola virus and they found two drugs which they found could help solve the epidemic. The analysis that would have taken years, happened in one day through Atomwise AI technology.

8. Precision Medicine

AI will have a big impact on genomics and genetics. AI will help identify patterns in massive data sets containing medical records and genetic information, which will help look for link to diseases and mutation.

In the coming future, AI will even be able to tell the doctors what happens in the cell when a DNA is changed through genetic variation, whether therapeutically or naturally.

9. Analysis of a Healthcare System

With more and more healthcare invoices becoming digital, every data related to the doctor, the treatment, and the medical establishment can be easily retrieved. Upon the mining of data, hospitals can generate reports on the mistakes they are continuously making in treating a certain type of condition, to help improve and even avoid unnecessary hospitalizations of patients, wherever needed.

A company in Netherlands, Zorgprisma Publiek, has been analyzing the invoices shared by the hospitals and using the IBM Watson technology to mine the collected data.

Are you ready to be a part of this revolutionary future? Contact our team of AI experts today.

Tripti Rai
Tripti Rai
Content Manager
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