AI aims high for saving big in healthcare

While everybody in healthcare mourns over expenditures, Accenture takes an optimistic curve with their new report, listing up a range of AI applications with a promise to save healthcare $150 billion over the next decade.

Accenture researchers call the artificial intelligence technology a ‘self-running engine’ for growth in healthcare. The reason is the AI’s skyrocketing growth with the number of healthcare-focused artificial intelligence startups accelerating from under 20 in 2012 to about 70 by mid-2016. Accordingly, the researchers forecast the health AI market to grow more than ten times in next five years, reaching $6.6 billion by 2021 with 40 percent of compound annual growth rate.

AI areas poised to grow and foster healthcare

The report highlights multiple applications of AI in medical field, including its use for risk analysis, wellness, diagnosis support, lifestyle management, clinical imaging and more. Particularly, Accenture defines the following 10 AI areas to augment current care delivery and bring in savings:

• Robot-assisted surgery – $40 billion
• Virtual nursing assistants – $20 billion
• Administrative workflow assistance – $18 billion
• Fraud detection – $17 billion
• Dosage error reduction – $16 billion
• Connected machines – $14 billion
• Clinical trial participant identifier – $13 billion
• Preliminary diagnosis – $5 billion
• Automated image diagnosis – $3 billion
• Cybersecurity – $2 billion

How they help

From the researchers’ viewpoint, these AI applications can benefit such elements of healthcare areas as:

Workforce

Artificial intelligence in hospitals can reduce repetitive work, allowing health specialists to focus on helping patients instead of endless clicking through the systems and applications. On the patient-facing side, AI symptom checkers can direct patients to outpatient, urgent and emergency care settings depending on the severity of possible conditions.

Care reach

With emerging technologies, multiple data sources arise. AI can streamline the process of health data integration and analysis across platforms and organizations, moving healthcare to a more transparent and interoperable HIE process.

Institutional readiness

By reshaping organization’s structure, governance and corporate culture with the AI-smart approach, providers can enhance care efficiency, quality and outcomes. For example, caregivers can opt in for improving and developing new approaches to training of clinical specialists, creating AI-driven collaboration workspaces, reshaping and automating administrative workflows and more.

Security

Oh, a major pain point for healthcare. Here, AI can be another brick in the wall, keeping patient data safe against multiple threats and vulnerabilities. With the ability to learn patterns by processing massive amounts of health data, AI in medical field can assist in finding APTs, automating SOC response and improving attack resistance.

AI sends healthcare to the future

Opposed to wowing AR, VR, 3D printing and other disruptive technologies, AI is one of the being here and now. It already thrusts healthcare from multiple points, powering distant care delivery, internal processes and information exchange, but that’s only a starting point. AI is expected to gain momentum in next ten years, and the organizations able to adopt it, harnessing its most ROI-promising applications, will be able to outperform the competitors and shape the future of healthcare. And we expect the future to bring in the balance of quality and costs, no less.