Medical professionals provide improved patient care through artificial intelligence

Today, we are seeing the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare as it helps us integrate disparate data types to answer complex questions that were previously unknown. According to the recent PwC Health Research Institute’s annual report, emerging technologies, including AI, are being deployed in healthcare and have great potential to disrupt in 2017.

This is exciting news! But the report stresses that healthcare organizations must coordinate and collaborate across the digital health ecosystem with human beings at the forefront to ensure that this new, rich intelligence is managed, protected and properly applied to patient care.

The algorithms being created are helping us answer medical questions across large volumes of data and diverse data elements, revealing connections that may not have ever been realized by humans because we do not have the capability to process large data sets and keep up with the new information that is coming at us every moment of our day.

Computer-based systems that incorporate AI techniques are projected to have a dramatic impact in healthcare, helping physicians better diagnose and treat their patients. AI techniques help process massive amounts of information and sort out patient similarities and dissimilarities as a clinical decision support tool. My colleague Christina Waters, Executive in Residence at The Innovation Institute, specializes in ways to accelerate identification of treatments, and says that more and more, medical professionals — clinicians and researchers — are able to use integrated and analyzed data sets and turn the findings into diagnosis and personalized treatments for a wide variety of diseases, including cancer.

The Innovation Institute

AI also provides education and the information needed to develop preventative programs to improve health and wellness of those with disease risk factors.

In the clinical setting, analyzing large volumes of clinically actionable information will help improve the care of patients. Yet, there are many things we do not know about disease as human biology is very complex. In 2003, even after the sequencing of the human genome, we continue to work on understanding how genes and gene mutations contribute to clinical phenotype.

AI is playing a tremendous role across the world to unravel biologic pathways that are relevant to disease. We do have the ability to integrate both clinical and research data to identify these pathways in hopes that we can then use therapies to restore “normal” biological function.

“We need to close the gap of time between discovery research and clinical impact,” said Waters. “Our ability to analyze large and disparate health data will enable us to do this and bring hope to the patients we serve,” she concluded.