The AI-Powered Clinician: Harnessing the Power of AI for Healthcare

There is no doubt that generative AI or artificial intelligence is a transformative force that is changing the landscape of how we do business. In the field of healthcare, AI can be a powerhouse in terms of diagnosing medical images, clinical decision support, and patient care enhancement to name a few areas of improvement. No, computers and robots will not be taking the jobs of clinicians. However, they will be helping to improve diagnostics, streamline data entry, and make decisions more personalized and tailored to each patient’s needs. Let’s explore just a few of the ways that AI will make your interactions with healthcare professionals more productive, efficient and accurate.

Enhancing Diagnostics

It may seem scary to a patient dealing with a health crisis that a “robot” may be aiding in diagnosis. Still, the technology provided by artificial intelligence could help catch something your doctor's trained eye missed. This technology could potentially support your doctor in diagnosing complex medical issues by synthesizing and comparing data to come up with a treatment plan. The National Institute of Health recently published an article reviewing the impact that AI could have on healthcare providers and their patients, finding that there are many areas where AI could improve patient outcomes. For instance, medical imaging in areas like mammography, x-rays, CAT scans, PET scans, and MRI results could be checked by artificial intelligence algorithms that potentially could detect subtle anomalies, making early disease detection possible. The NIH gave a more specific example in the context of mammography, “AI can help identify breast cancer at its earliest stages, greatly enhancing the chances of successful treatment. AI-powered medical imaging not only speeds up interpreting these images but also assists radiologists and other healthcare professionals in providing more accurate diagnoses.”

Clinical Decision Support

Just like analyzing imaging could improve and become more accurate with the use of AI, decision support could also benefit from this technology. AI algorithms can help take data from clinical notes, research papers, and medical literature to apply to a patient’s results from testing to help support clinical decisions. For instance, a healthcare provider could input a patient’s medical history, symptoms, scans, test results and description of findings to work in collaboration with AI to come up with a potential treatment plan. Findings by the NIH have found that error rates are lower when AI is used in conjunction with human analysis.

Personalized Medicine

Nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals are accustomed to seeing trends in illnesses and symptoms. AI takes those trends and applies them to huge data sets that can make diagnoses not only more accurate but personalized to the individual's healthcare needs. Virtual health assistants and remote monitoring systems powered by AI are expanding the possibilities of patient care by taking an individual’s data and personalizing the treatment options. In these three areas, AI is not a stand-alone process replacing the human component of healthcare, but rather a collaborative effort that empowers vast resources to find the answers to medical questions rapidly and with accuracy that humans may miss. AI algorithms could help improve patient outcomes, provide a more sustainable medical ecosystem and alleviate the growing complexity of healthcare data. Stay with Spectra Networks as we continue to monitor the evolution of generative AI in the field of healthcare.