Sachin Dev Duggal CEO : AI Trends That Will Revolutionise Healthcare

Artificial Intelligence is becoming part of our reality in many more ways than it seems. As per sachin dev duggal serial entrepreneur AI is taking over not just our digital experiences, shopping on Amazon or watching TV-Series on Netflix, but becoming part of our lives across many industries, ranging from Automotive to Finance. One such industry is poised to benefit greatly from the use of AI, impacting our day-to-day lives (probably) more than any other: Healthcare.

 

Research of artificial intelligence in medicine is rapidly developing. In 2016, AI projects in healthcare attracted more investment than any other sector of the global economy, and health care was even called "the most popular AI category for deals." This explosive growth is driven by a variety of reasons, starting with the ever-increasing adoption of big data solutions and the need for technological solutions to adapt health to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

AI’s penetration in healthcare, a sector accounting $2,487.7 billion in 2019 in the U.S. alone, will have a significant impact in one of the key aspects for every country, the human wellbeing. In particular, AI will be able to assist medical experts such as doctors, nurses and medical personnel to assist them in more effectively detect early onsets of diseases and empower them to provide even more benefits for their patients.

Three trends, at least, are clearly being defined in the AI Healthcare space.

1. Electronic Health Records (EHRs)

The first trend might not seem entirely related to AI but is actually the most important one because of its impact on every other one. Electronic Health Records are digital records of a patient’s medical history, diagnoses and health journey throughout the years, acting basically like a digital version of doctors notes. These are usually collected first as notes during patient visits and then entered into a database that keeps information in a structured format.

According to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, an Electronic Health Record (EHR) is “an electronic version of a patient's medical history, that is maintained by the provider over time, and may include all of the key administrative clinical data relevant to that persons care under a particular provider, including demographics, progress notes, problems, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory data, and radiology reports.”

There are currently many standards for record-keeping, but the most famous one, FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), is becoming the leading protocol used by companies of the like of Google and Apple. FHIR uses a modern suite of APIs, HTTP-based RESTful protocols, HTML and CSS for UI integration and allows to use JSON, XML or RDF for data representation. One of its goals is to facilitate legacy healthcare systems to communicate with each other to easily provide information to medical providers and individuals. This is allowed on a wide variety of devices from computers to tablets and cell phones, and, more importantly, allows third-party developers to provide medical applications which can be easily integrated into existing systems.