Electronic Health Reporter

Across sectors, artificial intelligence (AI) has become commonplace. AI helps streamline tasks, improve efficiency, and simplify complicated procedures in medicine. By 2021, Gartner assumes that 75% of these firms will invest in the potential of healthcare AI to enhance their overall performance.

Even with this, others still debate the pros and cons of the clinical and economic implications of relying on data-driven technology and algorithms for patient care, including:

Pro: It saves resources

As more critical activities are automated, medical practitioners will have more time to examine patients and detect diseases.

With the help of artificial intelligence, medical institutions may save time and money by performing treatments more quickly. Furthermore, AI has the potential to save substantial quantities of cash. It’s estimated that over $200 billion is wasted each year in the healthcare business. Many of these wasted expenses may be traced to tedious administrative tasks such as filing, assessing, and finalizing accounts.

Another area for improvement is determining medical necessity. Traditionally, hours of assessing patient history and information are required to establish medical needs accurately. Natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning (DL) algorithms are developed to help clinicians analyze hospital cases and prevent rejections.

Medical practitioners are given more time to help and interact with patients as resources and critical productivity hours are freed up.

Con: Susceptible to errors

Diagnostic data produced from millions of cataloged examples is the foundation of medical AI. A lack of information on specific environmental factors, illnesses, or demography might be misdiagnosed. Whatever the system, there will always be some missing information. There may be a lack of knowledge about particular populations and treatment responses when writing prescriptions.

This incidence may cause difficulties in identifying and treating individuals from particular backgrounds. To accommodate for data shortfalls, AI is constantly developing and improving. However, it’s vital to highlight that it may still exclude some groups from current domain knowledge.

Pro: There’s an ease of access

Sadly, the state of healthcare in many developing countries continues to lag well behind the world’s overall level of development. People living in more distant regions face death’s danger since it’s almost hard to get appropriate medical assistance promptly.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), unequal healthcare access leads to an 18.1-year difference in life expectancy amongst the wealthiest and poorest nations. New developments in AI have the potential to improve the quality of healthcare. Having such a system in place might help people better understand their symptoms and get the care they need.

The creation of recent apps has improved coordination between international and national healthcare institutions to give patients immediate support.

Con: It requires human supervision

Since it deals with personal data and affects many people’s quality of life, the healthcare business is very sensitive.

Instead of being wholly accountable, AI-powered solutions should aid medical practitioners in providing high-quality treatment to patients. Even while AI solutions are dependable, they need human oversight and knowledge to guarantee that the information supplied is relevant and the outcomes are correct.

Interactions with medical personnel also help people trust the healthcare organization and feel confident about the performed medical treatments performed on patients. However, with AI-powered healthcare equipment such as consultation aides or surgical robots, there’s always a loss of human connection.

Even if they conduct the correct diagnosis and follow the procedure, AI still has restrictions from doing activities that the personal touch can only accomplish.

Pro: It helps with research

Using AI, researchers may collect massive volumes of data from various sources. It’s crucial to access a wide variety of information to comprehend harmful conditions better. Real-time data study may benefit from the volume of available information as long as it is simple to translate.

Medical research organizations like the Childhood Cancer Data Lab have developed data-mining tools for doctors. It’s also possible to use AI to detect and study symptoms early in developing a disease. Also, it may preserve patients’ health while crucial diagnostic data can be obtained via telehealth technologies.

Con: It leads to layoffs

In the long run, artificial intelligence has the potential to reduce costs and relieve clinicians of some of their duties. This variable may result in the displacement of healthcare professionals who have spent time and money on education, raising concerns about equity.

AI is expected to open 58 million new jobs by 2022, according to research conducted by the World Economic Forum in 2018. On the other hand, AI is expected to replace or destroy 75 million employment by the same year, according to similar research.

Jobs demanding repetitive tasks will inevitably become redundant as AI gets more widely implemented across many sectors. Even though AI can improve many areas of healthcare and medicine, the healthcare industry must consider the social ramifications of AI’s use.

Summary

Artificial intelligence has great promise in the healthcare industry. Several healthcare organizations have already used the technology, confirming its value.

But the benefits of AI in healthcare are only relevant if properly implemented. This is why businesses need to be prepared for challenges.

Healthcare firms must be careful when selecting an AI solution and assess its pros and cons.