Uses of Artificial Intelligence Making the Future of Healthcare Bright
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The adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare simplifies the work and lives of doctors, patients, hospital administrators, and staff. AI performs routine tasks done by humans more efficiently, with lesser time and costs. According to market projections, it's one of the industries with the highest growth rates. By 2027, its market value will reach $266 billion, up from $27.23 billion in 2019. 

Apart from simplifying tasks, AI has numerous other applications in the healthcare industry. It's being used to mine and manage patient data, medical diagnosis tools, the discovery of links between genetic codes, surgery to power surgical robots, and maximizing general hospital efficiency. AI has been and continues to be of great benefit in modern healthcare. Here are some of the known applications of AI in the industry.

Efficient Diagnosis and Error Reduction  

According to statistics, misdiagnosis affects about 12 million adults in the US, with 1 in 3 resulting in severe injury or death. That makes the promise of an improved medical diagnosis process one of the best AI applications in healthcare. Lacking knowledge of complete patient medical history and huge workloads can lead to human errors. 

Since AI is immune to these variables, it can predict and diagnose diseases faster than medical professionals. Combined with deep Machine Learning (ML), AI can reduce the rates of misdiagnosis significantly. One example is AIRA, a diagnosis tool for retina disease that uses ML algorithms to identify defective symptoms. 

Developing New Medicines 

Another area of healthcare benefiting from AI is medicine development by bringing down the enormous costs of research, human resources, and time. It's estimated that it takes about six years to take drug development from the discovery stage to the clinical trials that take an average of another five years. That means, on average, it takes 12 years to develop one drug at the cost of about $2.5 billion. Now biopharmaceuticals are noticing the speed, accuracy, and efficiency AI can provide in developing new medicines.

Artificial intelligence is not only fast, but it also significantly cuts the cost and the process of drug development. AI can analyze extensive drug data, functions, properties, and structures without errors, getting overwhelmed, or requiring breaks.

Streamlining Patient Experience 

Time is essential in healthcare; even a minute too late is sometimes too late. Efficiency in streamlined processes allows medical facilities, doctors, clinicians, and hospital staff to attend to more patients daily. The most common patient complaints surround issues with long wait times, billing issues, and not having enough time with the doctor. 

AI is used in healthcare to eliminate redundant and manual processes to streamline patient experience by processing patient data from numerous data points more efficiently and quicker.

Mining and Managing Medical Data

The amount of data in healthcare is vast. It's easy for sensitive and confidential information to get lost or fall into the wrong hands. In addition, the inability to connect data points makes it harder to make a proper diagnosis because of the lack of enough historical patient data. It also slows the drug development process.

Many facilities now turn to AI solutions to stop data loss and theft and aid patient data consolidation and retrieval. The technology connects data in a matter of minutes, something that would have taken years to collect and process. 

AI Robot-Assisted Surgery

Robotic surgery is on the rise, and hospitals are using AI to perform surgeries of diverse nature and magnitude. Robotic surgery can help doctors perform even complex procedures with more flexibility, precision, and control better than humans. Robots have created a new kind of surgery by relaying images through their cameras to the doctors in the 3D magnified view of surgery sites. This images show doctors issues they would otherwise not see in traditional surgeries. 

In minimally invasive surgeries, robotic AI surgeries record fewer complications, less blood loss and pain, smaller scars, and faster recovery.  

AI is the Future of Healthcare

There are numerous examples and applications of AI in healthcare so far, with the medical fraternity embracing the changes brought by the technology. Now healthcare facilities can attend to patients faster, collect, keep and retrieve patient data faster, and relieve hospital staff of manual processes. The cost reduction and time in a drug trial and development process mean quicker development and testing of drugs and vaccines. Besides, there are reduces cases of misdiagnosis and the associated outcomes.