PERSONA THEME TRENDS WELL-BEING ISSUES
The Morphing Face of Healthcare in the World of AI
A
NEWSCOPE
RESEARCH
By Pratik Pawar
rtificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic, simply put - it’s a way of making a computer think intelligently, in a way human think and over a decade now it has managed to be fairly successful. It has found application in several domains, from consumer electronics like smartphones and smart home devices like Amazon’s Alexa to very niche applications in academic research. What began as a nascent academic pursuit to enable computers to think and solve problems using human-like cognitive capabilities has now invaded most aspects of human life, medicine and healthcare being no exception. Modern medicine has discovered 12
Volume 4 | Issue 1 | January-March 2019
around 60,000 ways things can go wrong with the human body and over thousands of years have probed these illnesses and disorders to better understand and treat them, one drug, one technique at a time. In recent years, however, there has been a dramatic shift in the pace of innovation in healthcare, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term used to cover a wide array of algorithms which mimic human cognitive functions and are self-correcting, and can ‘learn’ from a dataset. A MOUNTAIN OF UNSTRUCTURED DATA One area where AI would do heaps of help to physicians and medical
practitioners is to deal with the insurmountable amount of clinical unstructured data. Nearly 80% of the clinical information is “unstructured” and in a format incomprehensible to health information systems. Thus, getting useful information from these so-called unstructured databases becomes a labor-intensive task. To top that, clinical data is doubling every three years; which leaves the healthcare system with a massive volume of unsorted heterogeneous patient information which may hold answers to several health challenges, but strictly speaking is of little use in its current form. This challenge in healthcare of too much data, too little insight can be alleviated by employing Natural
