Artificial intelligence in healthcare: 10 leaders describe the future
May 18, 2017
This article was first published by Becker's Spine Review.
Artificial intelligence is already playing a role in healthcare delivery, on the clinical and statistical analysis side. Here, 10 leaders of healthcare and IT companies describe what the future could look like when artificial intelligence is more fully integrated.
Kapila Ratnam, PhD. Partner at NewSpring Capital and NewSpring Healthcare (Radnor, Pa.): "In the short term, AI has immediate applicability within the administration and operation of a hospital or healthcare system; more so than in changing how clinical care is delivered. This is predominantly because of how the healthcare ecosystem is regulated; it is one of the most highly regulated industries because it directly impacts individual lives.
Think more in terms of supply chain and inventory management within a hospital; for example, making sure a surgical room is correctly stocked with appropriate inventory based on the series of surgeries to be performed in that room on that day. Having inventory automatically tracked, with an algorithm that is able to assess what the needs are and send instructions to a robot to pick up and deliver appropriate supplies to the surgical room at the beginning of the day. I can also imagine a scenario where an algorithm is able to automatically access cost of supplies from multiple vendors and immediately analyze and assess which vendor delivers the best product at the lowest cost. And follow that up with ordering inventory appropriately, all done without human intervention.
Other applications are in security. For example, assessing whether someone within a health system is inappropriately accessing data and being able to flag that before there is an actual breach of clinical data (there is already a company that has built out an algorithm to do exactly this). Most breaches occur because an insider either deliberately or inadvertently accesses data they should not have."