In a survey by KPMG, many healthcare executives expressed interest and optimism about the potential impact of AI in their businesses. 89 percent of respondents said that AI is already creating efficiencies in their systems, and 91 percent say AI is increasing patient access to care. Executives are particularly optimistic about AI’s ability to accelerate disease diagnosis. Sixty-eight percent of respondents are confident that AI will eventually be effective in diagnosing patient illnesses and conditions. Ninety percent of healthcare respondents believe AI technology will improve the patient experience and anticipate seeing the greatest impact on diagnostics (47 percent), electronic records management (41 percent) and various robotic tasks (40 percent)
The AI software can be used to assist the healthcare system in extracting relevant insights, in medical imaging and diagnostics, drug discovery, in-patient care and hospital management, virtual assistance, precision medicine, lifestyle management, patient data and risk analysis, and research. Although many of these will take years to fully achieve their potential, they will be drivers of a future with healthcare that is far more effective and cost efficient.
For health systems and life science companies to start realizing the full potential of AI, partnerships within the healthcare system and cross-industry partnerships with entities that have significant technology expertise will be required. In recent years these partnerships are being announced with increasing frequency.
In December 2021, artificial intelligence researchers and technology leaders from Duke, Mayo Clinic and UC Berkeley and others will unveil their new Health AI Partnership. “There is an urgent need to cultivate capabilities across healthcare delivery settings to conduct AI software procurement, integration and lifecycle management”, according to the Health AI Partnership’s mission statement. Toward that end, researchers will develop an online curriculum to help educate IT leaders and will work with stakeholders such as target users, regulators, policymakers, payers and more. The guidance and curriculum developed by the Health AI Partnership will be open source and available online.
The goal of the new partnership is to “decentralize the high concentration of technology [and] regulatory expertise” from some leading health systems across the U.S. and use it to develop guidelines to help other organizations make smarter decisions.. That said, the initiative is focused on two specific subsets of healthcare AI. One type of AI is around diagnosis and treatment decisions: individual, patient-level diagnosis and treatment. The other is prioritization for some type of resource or program for care management programs.
