How AI Can Drive Healthcare Innovation – MarketWatch

Health systems around the world are carrying an increasingly heavy burden conferred by a virus that has impacted all aspects of service delivery. Heart and lung services in particular are stretched, and there is a growing backlog of patients waiting for elective surgery. As of October, the U.S. was “likely developing a nationwide backlog of millions of surgeries,” according to McKinsey. The corollary of this stark fact is higher morbidity and mortality rates.

This virus has held global healthcare delivery at a standstill for over 18 months, despite the promising vaccine roll-out. The U.S. “passed the hospital breaking point” in December, as a headline in The Atlantic put it.
Rochelle Walensky
of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that a recent increase in coronavirus cases could herald a “fourth surge.” If we do not act quickly to resolve the situation, the result could be thousands of untimely deaths.

Digital tools can help. In just one example, clinicians around the world are using artificial intelligence auto-contouring tech to automate and optimize the time-consuming task of pinpointing organs at risk. Researchers at one cancer center in New Mexico said that this AI saves them more than seven hours a week, and that number is rising. A team from the Feinstein Institute for Research has found that AI can dramatically reduce the clinical workload and help patients get more rest, giving medical professionals more time to focus on patients that need greater care support. Investor interest in AI in healthcare bears out these promising developments. In 2019, investors put $4 billion into the sector. Healthcare start-ups—including but not limited to AI companies—raised $80.6 billion in 2020, up from $53.7 billion in 2019. In the fourth quarter alone, startups “applying AI to healthcare” raised $2.3 billion, according to VentureBeat.

AI has other overwhelmingly positive implications for healthcare, from making logistics more efficient, to accelerating drug development and ultimately improving diagnosis and treatment. Improved data collection and analytics alone would have a tremendous impact on healthcare administration, while a wealth of data shows that in certain key areas, AI can process and support the recognition of abnormalities such as rare hereditary diseases.

There are barriers to its adoption, however. Innovation in healthcare is notoriously hard. Patients are naturally skeptical of machines. Healthcare professionals, too, have their doubts, in some cases viewing AI not as enabler or accelerant, but as hype. Implementation is the key challenge, requiring not just trustworthy AI “trained” by sufficiently large and varied data sets but also change at the regulatory and legislative levels.

As it is, with respect to AI-driven innovation healthcare lags far behind finance, real estate, education, oil, energy, and other sectors. A survey of physicians and consumers commissioned by Ernst & Young in 2019 concluded that less than a third of physicians and 27% of consumers thought their healthcare system performed well “in terms of introducing digital technology.” That has yet to change. And the pandemic has made it clear that medical technology can play a literally vital role in supporting doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals. The field of medical technology has changed surgical standards; Digital Surgery, the company I co-founded, and other AI solutions have shown their value in and outside of the operating theater.

Digitizing healthcare is a moral imperative. There is a strong consensus that AI cannot replace doctors for many reasons, not least of which is that healthcare’s powerfully emotional dimension cannot be replicated by a machine. What is far more likely is that technology will, ultimately, liberate medical professionals to invest in and strengthen their human qualities. In radiology, for instance, AI could take care of the many time-consuming technological tasks, empowering clinicians to guide patients through a diagnosis.

This would be true even if it were not the age of Covid, and even if it were not likely that increasing human encroachment on the natural world is likely to cause further pandemics, as the United Nations has warned. The question that remains now is how to ensure that medical professionals are at the center of this new wave of innovation, and receive the resources and support they need to drive it forward in the right way. AI can’t replace healthcare professionals. But it can make them better.

Jean Nehme, a physician, is co-founder of Digital Surgery and an AI healthcare investor.