Doctors are trained professionals, who work hard to keep people healthy, and when they work with AI to diagnose patients, it becomes even more powerful. Artificial Intelligence has been so far beneficial to the Healthcare industry, it is thriving in all of the different fields it’s been put in and is therefore creating a more efficient work environment in the industry.
The intention for integrating AI into the healthcare system is not to replace human jobs, but to help the work flow of everyone and make things as easy as they can possibly be. It seems like as a whole they are trying to preserve the doctors’ jobs, making it clear they are aware that they still need clinicians because AI can only do so much. One of the main reasons AI would not be able to completely replace healthcare jobs is just empathy. “I often ask participants in our digital transformation course if they would choose to have a serious medical diagnosis delivered by an AI trained to provide textbook empathy. Most participants would prefer to hear the news from a human doctor.” This is according to Harvard medical school. This quote is showing that the people who participate say they would rather have news broken to them by a human doctor. No matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, in my opinion it will never be able to replace a real person’s job, personally I don’t think it would be able to understand human emotions. According to the HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), there is a shortage of healthcare professionals all over the world.
AI is being used a lot in healthcare, and specifically for diagnosing patients, it has proven to be incredibly helpful. One thing that AI can do while diagnosing a patient is giving a very very personalized course of treatment. Not to mention how quickly it can analyze patient data or a patient’s charts to determine the possibilities, which in some critical situations where time is against the patient’s side, it can help the doctors find out the problem faster. Radiology is a huge field where AI is being used, because even though these doctors are amazing and trained to pay close attention to the tiniest details, running it through AI is both faster and sometimes eye-opening. The things that it can pick up in scans that even a trained professional wasn’t able to could save many patient lives. Oncology as well, sometimes the human eye doesn’t catch tiny irregularities that could indicate cancer that’s too small to see. According to the NIH AI is continuously trained to spot cancers on scans, every type of scan, and sometimes it can find things that humans can’t. Overall, AI being used to come up with treatment plans and make diagnoses has proven to be beneficial to the healthcare industry.
According to the Paragon Health Institute, 15 to 30 % of Healthcare costs is for administrative labor. AI is capable of doing this type of work quickly and efficiently, this could potentially lower costs because there no longer needs to be as much staff hired to do these jobs. “An analysis by McKinsey & Company estimates that an AI-enabled prior authorization process could decrease manual effort by 50-75 percent.” This shows that if AI is implemented into those administrative jobs, there wouldn’t be a need for as many workers and therefore less employees to pay. “The same underlying technologies could also listen to patient sessions and populate electronic health records for doctors, subsequently generating summaries of medical events and health status, freeing time for physicians.” Freeing time for doctors means that there will be more time for direct patient care and productivity, and the less time wasted means more work can be done. In the pharmaceutical industry there are also many advances using Artificial Intelligence, “AI is being used to design new drugs in less time than traditional methods, lowering development costs and accelerating time to market.” With all of these things considered, AI could significantly lower costs of healthcare and potentially make it more efficient and affordable.
In conclusion, Healthcare has been changed for the better with the use of AI in all of these different fields. AI is working alongside a lot of physicians instead of replacing their jobs and getting people out of a job. There has proven to be advancements in patient diagnoses with the use of AI and could potentially save a patient’s life if it detects something invisible to the human eye. Overall with the cost of Healthcare being higher than ever before, the use of AI could lower the expenses for everyone. In my personal opinion, the Industry is new to implementing these new technologies and so far it has done more good than bad.
