No matter your industry, in the year of 2023 Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere. An inescapable buzzword across multiple sectors, but its undeniable potential and groundbreaking methods cannot be ignored. In a time where healthcare systems across the globe are doing anything but thriving, leaders are grasping for any innovation that could save their healthcare sectors. Artificial Intelligence is brimming with opportunity and is set to settle as part of our daily lives, in terms of medical care this could in retaining staff, streamlining processes, saving expenses, increasing diagnoses and most importantly saving lives.
Introducing this month’s editors’ question is Chris Lloyd Jones, Head of Open Innovation at Avanade.
“By 2028, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact patient care, diagnosis, treatment, and the healthcare ecosystem, bringing together a synergy of AI and simulation for more efficient, personalised, and outcome-driven care. These impacts will primarily fall into three areas: co-pilot and augmentation, the democratisation of healthcare, and finally prediction & personalisation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t about creating more efficient machines; it’s about augmenting human potential. As such, it’s role as a ‘co-pilot’ in healthcare is an exciting prospect. Imagine AI systems that work alongside doctors, augmenting their capabilities and enabling them to provide personalised care at an unprecedented scale. These AI systems could help analyse patient symptoms, medical history, and even genomic data to aid doctors in diagnosing diseases accurately and quickly. These systems won’t just be virtual, they will also be ambient – using digital twins of the hospital to support ‘patient rounding,’ that is, checking in on patients at the right time and monitoring symptoms.
AI will also democratise access to healthcare expertise – in the last decade, we’ve seen the rise of telehealth and virtual consultations. In the next half-decade, AI integration will bridge the gap between urban and rural healthcare, providing patients in remote areas access to world-class medical advice, integrating insights from wearable devices on an individual level, and identifying relationships between rest and health or personal physical rhythms. This democratisation also extends to education, with AI being used to train healthcare professionals, continually updating them with the latest medical research and insights.
Also, AI will augment our ability to predict and prevent diseases. By analysing vast troves of data, AI can identify patterns that might elude human analysis, enabling early detection of conditions from cancer to cardiovascular disease. In parallel, simulations will allow healthcare professionals to predict the course of a disease and the impact of various treatment strategies, aiding them in making informed decisions tailored to each patient.
These trends will significantly advance disease prevention and improvements to the overall patient experience. However, this revolution is not just about technology; it’s about people. As we integrate AI deeper into our healthcare systems, we must remember that responsibility, transparency, and trust are the bedrock of the medical relationship, and ensure AI benefits are distributed equally, whilst adhering to the same high ethical standards. We must have systems that ensure equitable AI usage whilst avoiding biases in AI systems that could lead to disparities in healthcare provision.”
Following on from this, we spoke to experts from Nuance, a Microsoft company, Methods Analytics and PA Consulting. They offered us their thoughts on how AI can save the public healthcare space…
Neil Mason, Principal Healthcare Consultant at Methods Analytics
We see artificial intelligence hailed as both a saviour and an oppressor of society, but for healthcare, the opportunities are huge. Fundamentally, health and care is about people, those providing care, and those receiving it. Both groups can be supported by adoption of AI, but we need to do it well, and to focus it on people.
Care providers today have a seemingly limitless array of treatment options, more diagnostic tests than ever before, but the clinical judgement required to select the right one or to interpret results correctly and quickly will only increase. The strides being made in utilising AI to support diagnosis based on scan results highlights one area where value can be brought to bear. Combining a machine learning algorithm with a trained clinician is being shown in studies to result in greater accuracy in diagnosis. These optimised diagnosis pathways mean that patients are less likely to be missed, more likely to receive early treatment and enjoy better care and quality of life. In short, AI can now assist clinicians to deliver the best care.
Perhaps the greater opportunity exists in terms of reducing the burden on staff. The administrative burden in health and care is massive. This burden is perhaps the less explored area of the AI revolution, but it offers a chance to support public healthcare in a transformative way, especially in the world of constrained budgets we see today. Many hospital processes are ripe for the application of AI in one way or another: referrals, complaints, waiting list triage, none of which can be done without human intervention, could all be automated to some degree to allow staff to spend more time treating patients, and less time tapping on keyboards.
The crucial element to the implementation of AI in healthcare is that it must be well thought out. All healthcare data, but particularly that in the public sector, is held largely on trust, and the ethical and secure use of that data is a focus all organisations need to have. Transparency and openness to the public about use cases for AI accompanied by strong leadership in governance will be essential if the public healthcare sector is to make the most of the “AI revolution”, but if we manage those risks, there are large rewards.
Jenny Lewis, Digital Healthcare Expert, PA Consulting
How AI can support public healthcare
Healthcare costs are rising as personalised treatments come of age. We are close to a future where the number of care pathways being managed could be as numerous as the number of patients being treated. This is a phenomenal achievement for modern medicine but provides health systems with a significant challenge – how to safely provide significantly more individual care management within the constraints of a publicly funded system.
AI is key to a future of personalised care
Working out who, both staff and patient, needs to be where and when and receiving what treatment, can no longer be managed by human intuition alone. AI can compute and advise on the best permutations of patient, bed, theatre, clinician and diagnostic in a way that humans will never be able to.
Health systems are in the foothills of using the huge advances in AI technology to support these processes, for example, predicting when patients will decline, what their future clinical needs might be or when they need to change care settings. With this additional information, clinicians and operational staff can make informed choices about how to use limited resources to maximise clinical outcomes and patient experience.
How we can unlock the power of AI
As the delivery of clinical care is now mostly digitised and with the significant investments going into data platforms, including NHSE’s Federated Data Platform and the Trusted Research Environment programme, we are now able to access the data we need to deliver on this personalised care future. The next step is to capture the potential of AI in actively driving future health system processes. AI is high up the agenda of the majority of health system boards, but often without an understanding of what needs to be done next. Trusts and local care systems should use their data to rapidly prototype algorithms to aid clinical and operational decision making. They must access skilled data scientists who understand health datasets. These are currently in short supply in public health systems so looking to other industries or bringing in expertise from private organisations is needed. Boards also need to bring the public and patients along with them – the fear of AI replacing Doctors is a real one, but easily overcome through engagement and sensible applications of AI to care pathway management.
Without AI, the future of personalised clinical pathways will neither safe nor affordable.
Dr Simon Wallace, Chief Clinical Information Officer, Nuance, a Microsoft company
It’s been difficult to escape the far-reaching buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent months. Every industry has the potential to be transformed by it. However, nowhere is its productivity promise more needed than in healthcare.
The recent explosive growth of foundation and large language models, such as GPT-4, points to a future in which clinicians and patients are empowered with personalised medicine, clinical decision support, increased patient access, and workforce optimisation. But while the overarching promise for the future of generative AI in healthcare is clear, there are also ways in which this technology is already shaping healthcare delivery today.
For example, the healthcare industry is laden with administrative processes; many of which are manual, paper-based, time-consuming and error-prone. Inefficient healthcare workflows can occur in outpatient management, billing, appointment management, approvals, consultations, or any other part of the healthcare journey. In every instance, they have a negative impact on clinicians, patients and healthcare organisations.
Modern technologies, such as AI–powered speech recognition, can be used to help relieve some of these pressures, enabling clinicians to work more efficiently and intelligently. These technologies are designed to recognise and record passages of speech, converting them into detailed clinical notes, regardless of how quickly they’re delivered. By reducing repetition and supporting standardisation across departments, they can enhance the accuracy as well as the quality of patient records.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust is a prime example of an organisation that has benefited from this technology. The Trust’s 180 dental clinicians and support staff adopted AI-powered speech recognition to create accurate and detailed letters to relay information to their patients. Historically, these were written by manually typing from dictations made by clinicians, a time-consuming and inefficient process. Since deploying, the average turnaround time for clinical letters has gone from four weeks to just five days. It’s proved so successful that now over 90% of all staff across the Trust’s dental department are using this technology, in order to improve the quality of patient care and reduce some of the pressure on employees.
As AI’s use in healthcare continues to evolve, there’s no doubt that investment in the technology is only going to increase. In fact, NHS England is already investing in various pilots which use the technology, with £123million earmarked for AI projects over the next four years under the AI in Health and Care Award. This investment could be the key to relieving some of the administrative burden faced by our clinicians and helping to reduce burnout levels throughout the sector.