🫀Pulse Check: Issue 01

Welcome to the first issue of Pulse Check, your go-to guide for all things healthcare. In this issue, I will discuss the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on the healthcare industry and how it will transform the way we view healthcare today. 

The topic of AI can often be controversial with talk of lost jobs and dystopian societies. However, AI is not new and has been around for decades and decades, including having a long-standing prevalence in the healthcare industry.

To begin my discussion on the future implications of AI on healthcare, I want to address how it is already being used to enhance care quality. Forms of AI that are already being implemented in healthcare include: 

Neural Networks

In healthcare, neural networks are especially helpful in patient illness predictions and diagnosis. They are a subset of machine learning that can work and understand information more independently due to their ability to make decisions in a way that replicates the human brain. Some common uses in healthcare are: predicting the likelihood of a patient getting a specific disease or analyzing radiology imaging to identify the presence of cancerous tumors.

Rule-Based Expert Systems

Rule-based expert systems are a legacy form of artificial intelligence that make decisions based on a pre-configured set of if-then rules established by humans. Clinical communication and collaboration systems typically run on this kind of AI where they send high-priority alerts to doctors if the EHR triggers an urgent alarm or routes critical messages to the right on-call physicians based on the rules inputted in the on-call schedule. 

Robots

Surgical procedures have been using robots for a long time, enhancing surgeons’ ability to gain better visibility and make more accurate cuts and movements. This type of AI has been around for a long time and with the current advancements in AI, is only getting better. Robots are one of the more common AI usages not just in healthcare, so it is clear to see that the improvements will be rapid. 

Hopefully, taking a look at how AI is already being used in healthcare eases the minds of those who are worried about its infiltration into the industry. AI has been empowering healthcare professionals to improve their patient care for ages and as advancements emerge, the goal is only to further the success of care teams. 

Challenges of Implementing AI in the Healthcare Setting

Increase in Patient Distrust

AI cannot replace human connection. Considering the sensitivity of healthcare diagnoses and other health-related conversations, patients may not want to get their information from a machine or have follow-up questions that AI is not capable of answering just yet. So, it is imperative for healthcare teams to maintain a good balance between human intervention and AI usage to ensure that patients are not uncomfortable during their hospital visits. Additionally, AI is not always 100% accurate, so if the system generates incorrect information, there is a decrease in both trust and accountability that can lead to diminishing patient loyalty.

Job Automation

Professionals across the globe are questioning whether AI will eventually be able to automate their jobs to the point where they become obsolete. In the healthcare industry, adoption of new technologies is slow and the implementation of more advanced AI tools that can automate what care teams do will be few and far between. So, it is unlikely that positions in healthcare will be overrun by AI, especially considering that it cannot replace the empathy that the communication between doctor and patient provides. 

Regulations

The healthcare industry must follow strict guidelines, like HIPAA, to ensure that all technologies meet specific criteria. As new AI technologies emerge, it is not as easy for healthcare organizations to just implement them, as other industries. They must do their due diligence and ensure that all their tools adhere to HIPAA and all other regulations that healthcare organizations must follow. 

Output Quality Concerns

The performance of AI models is not always consistent and can begin to spit out aberrant and biased responses. And in the realm of healthcare, this is unacceptable. When investing in AI, healthcare IT teams must have a robust way to monitor these models and swiftly identify performance degradation to ensure that they are always on top of updates and incidents. Many teams integrate their monitoring solutions with alerting platforms that can ensure that on-call AI engineers are immediately aware of critical incidents within their AI tools. 

Cybersecurity Risks

Cybersecurity is a huge concern in healthcare, and AI platforms can be susceptible to breaches. And, if patients or doctors are inputting sensitive PHI, the impact of a cyberattack would be significant. Plus, the AI responses are not always monitored and it could potentially deliver outputs with sensitive data to the wrong individuals or even malicious parties. 

The Impact of AI on Productivity

As shown through the AI capabilities listed previously, it is a time saver for healthcare professionals, which is especially important considering that “the average US nurse spends 25% of work time on regulatory and administrative activities.” Through the usage of natural language processing models, nurses can relieve their time by automating processes like prescription refills and other mundane tasks. These models have the ability to interpret human language and understand simple requests, so refilling prescriptions can be done seamlessly for patients without human intervention. With this freed-up time, nurses can focus more on spending time with their patients and tending to their more urgent needs and requests that require compassionate communication. 

The Future of Patient Care

Human connection and empathy are key to successful patient outcomes, so while AI may seem like it would have the opposite effect, it may actually lead to better patient care. As care teams begin automating their mundane, repetitive processes, they will spend significantly less time wrestling with complicated, manual systems. By freeing up this time, doctors can provide patient care the way it should be…face-to-face with empathy and support. 

Conclusion

AI has been a hot topic in recent years, so it often comes across as new. However, healthcare organizations have been implementing AI for decades, helping to significantly improve medicine through the years. And as the AI industry rapidly advances, there will be so much more opportunity for care teams to better their practices and focus on what truly matters. 

Thank you for reading this issue of Pulse Check, by Zoe Collins. Subscribe for more!