Dec 11
2020
Where AI Can Make The Biggest Difference In Healthcare Today
By Abboud Chaballout, co-founder, Diagnoss.
Over the past several years, we’ve heard a lot of predictions about new and innovative ways artificial intelligence (AI) will dramatically impact healthcare. For example: robot doctors, drug discovery and clinical diagnosis. While there is – and should be – excitement around what innovation may come, we need to look at what technologies exist today, and more importantly, what providers need to deliver higher quality and more coordinated care at a lower cost.
In 2020, we’ve watched a pandemic upend the healthcare industry as ICUs became overwhelmed, clinics had to close their doors and patients avoided care. Physician burnout that was 42% in 2018 is soaring as COVID-19 cases surge and disruptions continue.
With this backdrop, it’s time for us all to agree that the biggest need in healthcare right now is to help providers do their job more effectively and remove burdens that both stand in the way of the delivery of care and lead to that unacceptable rate of burnout.
Medical coding
In 2019, the U.S. is predicted to have spent more than $3 trillion on healthcare, over 95% of which was dispersed through an insurance company, where every dollar must be codified. The current international standard for those codes is ICD-10, which contains more than 70,000 codes for diagnoses. With that many codes, it comes as no shock that estimates for annual medical coding errors are around 30%, with billing errors reaching as high as 80% in many cases.
With such a complex coding system, we are adding to a provider’s administrative burden which, for many, is already at a breaking point. Today, a physician spends an average of 16 minutes on administration, which adds up to several hours every single day.