How AI is Making a Difference in Healthcare
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When most people think about technology in healthcare they think about machines: CTs, ECGs, injection pumps, machines that go ping. However, software plays a huge role in healthcare and AI is building on all the work done for the last several decades across the industry.
Everyone’s talking about AI, about how much it can do – it’s the latest shiny, new toy. People are trying out ChatGPT to do all sorts of things, with varying levels of success. Companies of all stripes are talking about needing to have AI in their toolbox, as part of their strategy – just like they did about the internet in the late 1990s, Web 2.0 in the late aughts, or blockchain five years ago. It can feel a bit like a fad, but for us here at Tali it isn’t just about using AI because it is the latest, cool thing. It’s about using the right technology, and using it well, to make a difference.
There are two scenarios that really leap out for me when AI applications make sense: first, when you've got too much information for a human to make sense of on their own; or second, when the work is mundane but still requires some complex reasoning or knowledge to determine what to do next. Today, I’m mostly talking about the former, I’ll talk more about the latter in my next post.
The key in these two situations is you get the computer to do what computers are good at so that you can let humans do what humans are good at. If the human being can focus on their judgment, empathy and creativity and not on marshalling masses of information, the patient will have a much better experience.
So how do you get started? Well, above all else, AI needs data. It doesn't matter what the problem is, whether you're talking about finding cat videos or diagnosing disease, the steps are still the same: you need enough data, it needs to be well-defined, expertly labelled, representative and unbiased.
Health data comes primarily from EHRs. They started out as systems to assist in billing, and over time more and more administrative tasks were incorporated, from scheduling to bed management, departmental systems and so on. As hardware improved and it has become easier to record data at the bedside, they're now used to document clinical care throughout the hospital and in primary care (for a more extensive background on Electronic Health Records (EHRs), I’d recommend this
