The use of artificial intelligence can reduce waste and simplify the lives of patients, doctors, and hospital administrators by performing tasks usually requiring a human, at a fraction of the cost and time. But is there a risk?
ChatGPT
Open AI’s ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by a large language model that mimics traditional writing. The ability of ChatGPT to rapidly generate human-like text and answer questions based on large amounts of data can help individuals and communities make informed health decisions.
Does AI Improve Healthcare?
Healthcare practices have already been transformed by artificial intelligence. Appointments, treatment details, and tracking patient histories are among the existing innovations. The use of artificial intelligence can streamline time-consuming tasks in healthcare facilities such as appointment scheduling, patient information, care recommendations, and reminders.
With AI, medical professionals can optimize critical clinical decisions by utilizing immediate, precise data. More rapid decisions and diagnosis can result in better prevention, cost savings, and shorter patient wait times.
Physician-patient relationships can also be improved with real-time analytics. Engaging patients in their healthcare by providing them with current, vital patient data through their mobile devices is currently on the rise. Patients’ statuses and emergencies can also be immediately communicated to doctors and nurses using AI.
In addition to streamlining procedures, automating functions, sharing data instantly, and organizing operations, artificial intelligence helps reduce workload in our particularly stressed and overworked healthcare environment.
AI is used to minimize costs resulting from insurance claim denials. Health providers can preventatively identify and address mistaken claims with AI to reduce insurance companies’ denial rates saving hospital staff the time it would take to work through and resubmit a claim. With faster payments and better claims accuracy, practices and hospitals can have greater confidence predicting reimbursement times, increasing their willingness to accept a greater variety of insurance plans, benefiting patients, and increasing total revenue.
Automated processes
The automation of vital processes allows medical professionals to spend more time assessing patients and diagnosing illnesses. Using artificial intelligence, medical facilities can save valuable productivity hours and reduce the 200 billion dollars wasted in the healthcare industry every year as many of these unnecessary costs are attributed to administrative workload, such as filing, reviewing, and resolving accounts.
Medical necessity determination can also be performed by AI, a process that historically takes hours of patient history review and information gathering.
Limits of AI in Medicine
The use of AI in the medical field has come a long way, but it will continue to require human input for the foreseeable future to combat a number of hurdles.
Surgical robots, for example, operate logically rather than empathically. Experienced health practitioners may make vital patient behavioral observations that are key in diagnosing or preventing medical complications.
Patient needs often extend beyond immediate physical conditions that require human interaction. Currently, AI can overlook these social, economic, and historical factors that can affect patient care.
Using AI can allocate patients to specific care centers based on their diagnoses and may not consider individual preferences or economic restrictions, reducing patient compliance.
When incorporating AI systems, privacy is a major concern. Hospitals may face difficulties in tranferring HIPAA-protected data from other devices and may be limited in its ability by these regulatory and social restrictions.
Medical AI relies heavily on diagnostic data from millions of catalogued cases. In situations where incomplete data exists regarding illnesses, demographics, or environmental factors, misdiagnosis is a concern, particularly when prescribing medications.
Security Risks
Currently, AI is viewed as a threat by 88% of decision-makers in the security industry. As AI is generally dependent on data networks, AI systems are susceptible to security risks. The continued improvement of AI cyber security will be required to ensure the technology is sustainable. As AI uses new data to make systems smarter and more accurate, cyberattacks will incorporate into AI to evolve with each failure and success, making them more difficult to predict and prevent. Once damaging threats out-maneuver current security defenses, the attacks will be much more difficult to address.
The Future of AI Healthcare
AI undoubtedly has the potential to improve healthcare systems. Reducing waste and workload by automating tedious tasks can free up clinician time, allowing for more patient interaction. Improving data accessibility assists healthcare professionals in taking the right steps in patient care as real-time data can lead to more rapid diagnoses and treatment. Subject Matter Experts are increasingly involved in AI development, making the technology more accurate and reliable. As AI is increasingly applied to healthcare, its limits and challenges will continue to be confronted and resolved. AI may always require some human surveillance to overcome natural gaps in population information, and the current risk from calculated cyberattacks is a major concern. However, despite the challenges and limits AI faces, this innovative technology promises extraordinary benefits to the healthcare industry.
If you would like more information on how technology is helping to increase practice efficiency, and improve outcomes for your staff as well as patients, then we invite you to explore our resources at vowhs.com. Have questions? If so, we’d enjoy chatting with you, contact us at 412.424.2260 | info@vowhs.com.
