Research one or two specific ways artificial intelligence could be used to improve health care.
Several industries have been transformed by the use of artificial intelligence in their day-to-day operation, and the healthcare industry is also likely to gain similar benefits by adopting the use of artificial intelligence on a large scale. While AI has been incorporated in the healthcare industry, although to a minimal extent, there still exist several ways that it can be used to improve healthcare services. Artificial intelligence can be incorporated in precision medicine and in disease diagnosis to improve healthcare even more. This paper will focus on two ways that AI can be used in healthcare to improve the quality of healthcare outcomes.
Precision medicine focuses on developing interventions for individual patients or a group of patients based on their disease characteristics and response to the treatments. Precision medicine aims to utilize individual biology rather than population biology, which has been used at all stages of medical care. This requires advanced technology to collect, analyze and develop the treatments for the patients. Precision medicine considers the genetics of the individual patients and other factors that are likely to affect the treatment, including gender, race, family history, age, metabolic and immune profile, environmental vulnerability, and microbiome. Artificial intelligence can be used to collect genetic and physiologic information about the patients, analyze the data and develop tailored treatments based on the information leading to improved healthcare outcomes (Bohr & Mamarzadeh, 2020).
Artificial intelligence can also be used in disease diagnosis and prediction, especially for cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and nervous system diseases. Correctly diagnosing diseases is a skill that requires long periods to develop, and in many fields such as cardiology, the demand for such experts exceeds the supply. Cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and nervous system diseases are significant conditions that affect a significant section of the population globally, and they are also associated with high medical expenses, which affects families of such patients. Early diagnosis of such diseases and an accurate prediction of their occurrences would provide significant benefits to the patients and lead to improved healthcare outcomes. Artificial intelligence can be used to predict the occurrence of such diseases and diagnose them early enough before they occur. This will assist in putting in place the necessary prevention strategies and treatment protocols to prevent the conditions from developing to advanced stages, which are not easily treated. AI can be used to interpret CT, and MRI scans for various body parts such as the lungs, heart, and brain to determine the possibility of diseases and make the correct diagnosis faster than human doctors would (Datta et al., 2020).
What considerations must be taken into account before implementing such a system?
For AI to be implemented successfully in disease prediction and diagnosis and precision medicine, several considerations must be taken into account. Some of these considerations include the cost of adopting the AI technology and maintaining the technology in healthcare; the cost of implementing and running the AI might be higher than the benefits gained; in such circumstances, it would not be necessary to adopt such technologies. Medical staff skills required to run the technology, AI might require specialized computer skills to run, and thus the staff should develop such skills, or people with such skills should be hired to run the machines. Patient and staff attitudes towards AI in the treatment process can also influence whether it succeeds or fails. Availability of other resources, AI will require supportive resources such as external data storage centers for the smooth running of the technology, and thus the availability of such resources should be considered (Borycki & Kushniruk, 2021).
References
Borycki, E. M., & Kushniruk, A. W. (2021). The Safety of AI in Healthcare: Emerging Issues and Considerations for Healthcare. In Multiple Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (pp. 13-22). Springer, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-67303-1_2
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