Chris Cashwell is the CEO of Azra AI, a healthtech firm that accelerates the identification and treatment of cancer through AI & automation.
Operating as a hospital in today’s world is challenging, to say the least. Hospitals are not only facing rising healthcare costs, but they’re also dealing with staffing shortages, and those are just two of the challenges. There are obviously others, and you don’t have to be an economist to know that problems like these will threaten a hospital’s future, which is why it’s crucial that hospitals find unique ways to improve operations and patient care. Enter artificial intelligence and automation.
Six Ways AI Can Positively Transform Healthcare
The future of healthcare, namely AI, is here, and hospitals looking for a viability boost will have to get involved in this revolution. That means educating clinicians and administrators about the ways in which AI will reshape healthcare.
Through leading a health technology firm that specializes in AI solutions, I’ve seen there are six primary benefits healthcare teams have the potential to gain when adopting AI in their workflows:
1. Automate administrative tasks and workflows: Manual, repetitive tasks like case finding and prepopulating tumor registries could be a thing of the past with AI. As a result, nurses and clinical staff will have more time to focus on patient care.
2. Speed up treatment: The amount of clinical data AI can sort through is staggering, which can lead to benefits like identifying positive cancer diagnoses and suspicious findings faster. Ultimately, this can allow care teams to contact high-risk patients faster and start treating them sooner.
3. Improve patient outcomes: AI-powered algorithms can analyze large amounts of patient data to identify early signs of disease. That means healthcare professionals will be able to diagnose and treat patients earlier, potentially leading to better outcomes.
4. Increase patient engagement: With AI being able to do things like generate appointment reminders and track symptoms, patients will have a new way to interact with their healthcare team. From my perspective, this should help increase adherence rates and, in the long run, enhance health outcomes.
5. Increase service line revenue: With the improved efficiency and accuracy offered by AI, hospitals and clinics can handle larger volumes of screenings and diagnostic procedures. Timely and accurate results attract more patients, leading to an increased influx of cases within the service line. As a result, the service line’s capacity utilization improves, generating higher patient volumes and, consequently, increased revenue.
6. Create greater health equity: From my perspective, AI could help eliminate systemic biases and create better, more equitable treatment models for patients of all backgrounds by leveraging natural language processing, machine learning algorithms and patient data analysis. AI can even help identify patients who may not have access to necessary medical care and alert qualified providers.
The Top Challenges Of Introducing AI Into Healthcare
AI doesn’t come without challenges, of course, the first being that it can be difficult to know where to start. AI has such a broad definition that it can mean different things to different people. What often happens is people get so enamored with AI that they try to find something for AI to fix. That typically doesn’t work well.
Instead, it’s better to identify the problems you want to solve and figure out how AI can help you solve them. This approach ensures that AI initiatives are aligned with real needs and have a clear purpose, increasing the chances of success.
Another challenge is understanding how to inject AI into solutions. Within AI, there’s a whole industry that works with problems involving clinical decision support like, for instance, replacing or augmenting the decision of the physicians. But there’s another industry within AI regarding unstructured data. The question becomes how to use AI to read clinical notes, reviews and items that are already hidden in the data but weren’t visible prior to using AI.
Strategies To Implement AI In Your Healthcare Organization
To help you bring AI into your organization successfully, consider these four tips:
Involve your staff.
There’s an illusion that AI will take away jobs, decrease decision-making among staff and be more complicated than what clinicians and other staff are used to. Yet, if AI is successful, it should be none of those things. Instead of replacing people, AI can help free up time so that individuals can do more of what they’re trained to do. By getting staff across the entire workflow involved, you’ll get better solutions, uncover things AI can do you may not have known about and get better buy-in from staff.
Start with smaller projects.
It’s common to think that when you introduce AI, it has to have a huge impact on an organization. Instead, look at the ways in which AI can provide a light, elegant lift that could quickly make a difference for your patients and in your clinicians’ daily workflow. After all, 80% improvement is better than no improvement.
Get comfortable examining the data.
When you start using AI, you have access to data you’ve never had before. Although it can be mind-boggling, let AI show you that data and help you map out where you want to go with your project.
Be open-minded.
You might think of AI as being simply clinical decision support or automation, but don’t be afraid to use AI in different ways than you’d expected. To that end, put your trust in the partners you’ve selected.
I believe it’s time for healthcare professionals to consider how they might be able to leverage AI. The amount of data being generated in healthcare settings is difficult for people to consume and make sense of, especially when they’re also trying to provide excellent patient care. By implementing AI, you could help set your healthcare organization up for success in the long term and ensure that all of its vital signs stay healthy and thriving.
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