The pandemic that the world witnessed has once again stressed the importance of a modern and sturdy healthcare system. Moreover, the last two years taught us how critical it is to stay updated and ready regarding the latest technologies aiding the healthcare machinery.

 According to a WHO report, health systems also need a larger workforce. However, although the global economy could create 40 million new health-sector jobs by 2030, there is still a projected shortfall of 9.9 million physicians, nurses, and midwives globally over the same period, according to the World Health Organization.

Talking about technology, AI has been hugely popular with the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in consumer health applications gaining momentum and benefiting people.

The modern and busy lifestyles paved the way for healthcare apps, which encourage a healthier lifestyle and proactive management of a day to day life in the most convenient way at the individual level without much assistance. Moreover, it provides control of health and well-being to consumers.

Artificial intelligence gives healthcare professionals ease when it comes to monitoring, understanding and analyzing the needs and lifestyle patterns. On a more extensive level, AI is being used to detect diseases like cancer. With the usage of AI, the review and result analysis of mammograms has drastically improved in terms of TAT and accuracy.

Let's understand in what ways is AI aiding healthcare systems:

Increased operational efficiency 

With the optimization of material procurement and consumption along with standardizing clinical pathways and treatment guidelines for homogeneous patient pools can aid in bringing down material costs, which are around 20-35% of hospital expenses. With the help of AI, staffing can also be streamlined dynamically with workload patterns by cutting down on non-value-adding tasks. AI can also help in improving facility utilization by standardizing clinical pathways and predicting the length of stay of patients.

Optimized clinical workflows

With the usage of AI, workflows can be streamlined through automation, which can further improve accuracy by keeping the correct and relevant information accessible to the right people. Predictive and clinical tools to forecast issues such as no-shows or follow-ups of patients improve care delivery.

Quick diagnosis and decision support

Using AI-enabled image analysis and diagnosis from digital pathology and radiology images the more serious ones that need immediate attention can be speeded up. This will also help in the identification of risky patients so as to provide real-time support to doctors and clinicians. AI has been phenomenal in assisting the concept of Telehealth and last-mile delivery of primary care.

The application of AI in recent years has effectively improved Cancer screening, Tuberculosis diagnosis, Diabetic retinopathy screening, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease diagnosis and management. The use of Machine Learning-based deep-learning algorithms can provide valuable insights to healthcare providers in deciding the course of action and strategies for patients. It can also aid in the early detection and prevention of diseases by capturing the vitals of patients. 

NLP-based virtual personal assistants can help in appointment scheduling, monitoring, understanding the needs of patients. This can also be effective in assisting prospective and discharged patients in the absence of medical personnel. In addition, virtual assistants or chatbots capturing data through a voice interface can help in providing assistance to senior citizens.

Right during the pandemic, we saw the usage of an AI-enabled Chatbot by MyGov that bridged communication and improved people registering their covid related problems even while we were experiencing a severe shortage of health care manpower.

Additionally, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) deployed the Watson Assistant on its portal to respond to specific queries of frontline staff and data entry operators from various testing and diagnostic facilities across the country on COVID-19. 

AI-based applications have tremendously helped biopharmaceutical companies in shortening the preclinical drug identification and design process from several years to a few days or months. This advancement helped pharmaceutical companies to narrow down effective pharmaceutical therapies to curb the spread of COVID19 by repurposing drugs.

AI is set to improve the healthcare scenario by intervening in almost every aspect of healthcare; lifestyle improvement, improving the accuracy of detection, faster and even remote diagnosis, post-diagnosis decision making, treatment, elderly care, R&D, and training. India has its challenges in healthcare due to the large population and hence inadequacy in healthcare manpower along with increasing cases of chronic diseases even in the younger population. The solution to these challenges lies with technology; hence, we are all keeping our hopes high and looking at AI to change the game.