If you think artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere today, just wait a few years.
The technology is advancing at a hyper-rapid pace and is sure to have an increasingly larger impact on the way individuals around the world live — particularly as it relates to managing their health.
This, as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) held a roundtable discussion on Friday (Oct. 6) that highlighted the Biden-Harris Administration’s priorities to “develop and deploy” advanced AI tools that benefit the health and wellbeing of all Americans.
Per the meeting’s readout, Arati Prabhakar, assistant to the president and director of the OSTP encouraged roundtable participants — a distinguished group of leaders from across sectors, including healthcare, academia, industry, and patient advocacy — to “seize the powerful tools of AI” to improve health outcomes for more Americans, while also leveraging best practices for effective risk management and mitigation.
And while public advocates are urging the healthcare sector forward, private industry players are also working to leverage the capabilities of AI’s innovations and aiming them at improving patient health and provider efficacy.
Read also: Can Always-On AI Give Healthcare Providers a Helping Hand?
The healthcare industry is (in)famously riddled with legacy manual processes where doctors, nurses, and hospital system administrators are drowning in paperwork as they wait for the snail’s pace of healthcare’s ongoing digitization to accrete workflow efficiencies.
And that’s where the neural network capabilities of AI’s large language models (LLMs) can help. AI can analyze data and recognize patterns in real time, and move seamlessly between modalities — e.g., transcribing from voice to text.
On Monday (Oct. 9), NextGen Healthcare launched an AI solution designed to interpret patient-provider conversations in real time, providing summarized appointments and documenting care plans. The next generation solution delivers AI-generated subjective, objective, assessment and plan (SOAP) notes directly into the electronic health record (EHR), boosting provider efficiency and improving patient care.
Underscoring the interest in moving healthcare forward with the use of AI, tech giant and Alphabet subsidiary Google on Monday also debuted its own AI powered Vertex AI Search which allows users to find accurate clinical information much more efficiently, and to search a broad spectrum of data from clinical sources — helping doctors learn a patient’s history without reviewing their own notes or other health records separately.
When it comes to the back office, where mountains of paperwork tend to reside, UiPath last week (Oct. 3) teamed up with firm Apprio to offer automated revenue cycle management services to healthcare organizations.
As PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, healthcare organizations are sitting on a wealth of information in the “form of disparate data silos,” something modern AI can condense to help organizations “make better business decisions, shape better clinical outcomes,” and improve the patient experience.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in an interview last Monday (Oct. 2) that AI will also enable advancements in healthcare, potentially leading to longer lifespans and a reduced risk of diseases like cancer.
But as AI, still a new and relatively unproven technology, enters increasingly sensitive areas it is important not to place too much trust in the technology alone.
Read more: Most Americans Take Cautious Approach to Generative AI in Healthcare
The latest PYMNTS Intelligence finds that 6 in 10 Americans are uncomfortable with a provider relying on AI in their healthcare (60%), while just under that amount believe that using AI to diagnose diseases and suggest treatments would harm the patient-provider relationship (57%).
It isn’t that Americans don’t see the upside, but there exists an undercurrent of the unknown around whether the information AI platforms provide is safe and reliable 100% of the time, particularly when it comes to sensitive areas like banking and healthcare.
That’s why healthcare-specific AI models trained on high quality industry data will be crucial for broader acceptance of AI in health delivery beyond streamlining back office workflows.
Also, these right-now consumer sentiments may shift over time as technology matures and regulatory guidelines become more robust.
In time, generative AI will sharpen its analysis, improving accuracy in diagnoses and recommended treatments, according to “Generative AI Can Elevate Health and Revolutionize Healthcare,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration.
Already, multimodal image recognition technologies like GPT-4V are transforming the way that databases of medical images can be leveraged within healthcare.
And as PYMNTS has written, due to the sensitivities inherent to healthcare and the need for replicable accuracy and precision, the industry could serve to be the biggest proving ground for generative AI’s capabilities.
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