We come across this question often – ‘the human element is so important in the healthcare sector and there is a limited scope of what can be digitized/ automated/ solved using AI. Does digital enablement really benefit the healthcare sector, especially hospitals or providers?’
The short answer – Yes! It does.
USD 150 billion…
That’s the projected annual savings that will accrue to the US healthcare economy through clinical application of AI by 2026 as per a 2017 Accenture study.
70% …
That’s how much time that healthcare practitioners can save through the application of intelligent automation in their everyday work according to a 2020 McKinsey report.
Read on to understand how digital enablement and digital work assistants empower the healthcare sector.
Digital Enablement in Healthcare
By digital enablement, we mean augmenting people in healthcare facilities across roles and functions with personalized, AI-powered digital work assistants, thereby making them super productive. Digital enablement platforms help collate data from across multiple, siloed sources including EHR and help convert them into invaluable insights that augment professionals across roles and functions in the healthcare sector. Digital enablement helps weed out inefficiencies, leakages and wastage, thereby, dramatically improving the hospital/ healthcare institution’s overall performance.
Practical Use Cases of Digital Assistants in Healthcare
Expert and Intern to Healthcare Professionals
Unlike legacy technology in healthcare, digital assistants are more than just tools and algorithms who complement healthcare professionals. They augment human knowledge and abilities by acting as interns and experts at once.
- Acting as experts, they offer nuanced contextual knowledge and interactive help to doctors, nurses and other professionals to augment them in doing their work.
- As intern, they offer intelligent automation capabilities to perform tasks that the professionals do not want to perform – manual drudgery, repetitive tasks and so on.
For instance, paramedics do not have the advantage of second opinions with other experts in an ER; they are by themselves at the back of an ambulance. What they do or don’t has an impact on patient outcomes/ recovery. An AI-powered digital assistant can take notes, respond to voice inputs, transcribe voice commands, validate medicine dosage, document tasks and so on. The critical and expert insights offered empowers paramedics to extend effective incident response to the patient before they reach the hospital.
Efficient Management of Electronic Health Records & Non-Care Related Activities
Even the iterations have not been able to do enough to reduce grunt work. So, healthcare professionals end up spending more time on paperwork and administrative tasks than seeing patients.
Equipped with Natural Language Processing (NLP), voice recognition and speech-to-text capabilities, AI-powered digital assistants can efficiently and accurately engage in non-patient care activities that clinicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals spend 70% of their time doing. For instance,
An Accenture study holds that through the intelligent automation of these repetitive tasks, clinicians can save 17% of their work time while registered nurses save 51% of their time. The time saved could be redirected towards where it matters most – patient care and experiences.
Plus, according to Insider Intelligence, hospitals stand to save 30% of healthcare costs that are associated with administrative tasks through intelligent automation.
Faster, Precise and More Targeted Diagnostics
AI-powered digital assistants to clinicians can collate patient history, records and test reports from across disparate sources to offer deep insights to clinicians. They enable clinicians in reading pathology imaging results with greater accuracy to detect details that may miss the human eye. They can further equip clinicians with other critical insights to enable them to make precise diagnosis.
For instance, oncologists will be able to detect cancers at a much earlier stage. They could further analyze the rate of progress of the cancer to decide the course of treatment.
Let’s consider another example of a patient who presents multiple symptoms that correlate with various health conditions, causing a delay in diagnosis. Equipped with Machine Learning (ML) and NLP, the clinician’s AI-powered digital work assistant can analyze large sets of structured data (reports, medical records, etc.) and unstructured data (clinician’s notes, documented speech-to-text, etc.) to help narrow down diagnoses to one or two outcomes.
Thereon, the clinician can come to a more concrete conclusion and build a treatment plan, putting the patient on the road to recovery sooner. So, these AI-powered clinician assistants improve not just the efficiency of the process, but help improve the precision of diagnoses, treatment effectiveness and patient outcomes.
Turning EHR and Other Data into Real-Time, Actionable Insights
Despite the availability of voluminous data (since EHR digitizes data), the prevailing technology in healthcare has not been able to convert data into real-time, actionable insights that aid in swifter decision-making, precise diagnosis, risk management and better outcomes.
For instance, the analysis of EHR can help identify patterns in infection and understand risks even before patients show symptoms. And digital enablement makes this process efficient, hassle-free, fast and accurate.
The ability of machine learning algorithms to analyze complex datasets, trace patterns and offer insights is particularly valuable in understanding risk factors associated with a range of diseases and medical conditions including strokes and depression. This enables early detection and effective treatment.
Efficient Supply Chain and Procurement Management
Digital work assistants empower supply chain executives with real-time visibility and critical insights while rooting out manual drudgery and repetitive tasks. Digital enablement enables supply chain and procurement teams to sense, analyze and respond proactively, reducing risks, wastage, inefficiencies and variances.
The Bottomline
In the dynamic and complex future of work, RPA/ hyper-automation is not as scalable and effective as digital enablement as it is not built with people at its core. Digital enablement takes a more humane, people-centric approach to empower clinicians, nurses, paramedics, admin staff and other employees in healthcare institutions to accomplish more. In effect, it nurtures digital fluency across roles and functions in healthcare to enable healthcare professionals to thrive in the future of work.
References:
https://www.businessinsider.com/artificial-intelligence-healthcare?IR=T
https://healthcareweekly.com/artificial-intelligence-in-healthcare/
https://gcn.com/articles/2019/09/25/ai-audrey-responders.aspx
https://healthitanalytics.com/news/top-12-ways-artificial-intelligence-will-impact-healthcare
https://www.healthrecoverysolutions.com/blog/the-growth-of-artificial-intelligence-ai-in-healthcare