Technology has been reshaping healthcare over the past century in ways that make healthcare workers’ jobs easier and more efficient. With the recent advances and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), healthcare has evolved to accommodate these new developments in ways that are beneficial for both providers and patients.Â
When provided with large sets of data, it can take a group of researchers weeks, if not months, to go through this information, and AI can summarize it to make accurate predictions in seconds to minutes. This process makes it much less time-consuming, allowing providers to use their time for more meaningful work.Â
AI streamlines clinical research by helping identify eligible participants, optimizing trial designs and analyzing results in real-time. This leads to faster, cheaper and more inclusive trials, accelerating the path to new remedies.
Another way in which AI has proven useful is in providing more accurate and rapid diagnoses. Many of us have had real-time experience with this through Googling our symptoms ,or even describing them to ChatGPT, and having it diagnose us. AI can efficiently analyze the patient’s symptoms and past medical history to diagnose them with a disease and assist physicians in developing a treatment plan.Â
The intersection of AI and healthcare has become more popular recently, with schools like Johns Hopkins University and Harvard providing programs and certifications for AI in Healthcare.Â
One setback when AI is used so often in healthcare settings is that large language models (LLMs) are trained on a specific set of data and can be biased in making diagnoses or decisions because they are not updated or have the decision-making capabilities that doctors and healthcare workers have due to their extensive schooling. Another criticism involves the privacy of patients’ personal health information, as required by HIPAA. If AI can access our personal information, it raises questions about the ethical implications of how that information is used. AI isn’t the future of healthcare; it’s the present. Providers and systems that are integrating it are already realizing how efficient and transformative it can be.
From diagnosing diseases and developing personalized treatment plans to assisting clinicians with real-time decision-making, AI has proven its potential to enhance patient care across healthcare settings. But the power of AI doesn’t lie in replacing clinicians; it lies in supporting them. The real challenge now is ensuring we integrate AI responsibly, balancing innovation with ethics and addressing concerns around data privacy and bias, while preserving the importance of the human touch. So, the question isn’t if we’ll use AI in healthcare. It’s how we’ll use it.