Imagine a world where your smartwatch not only tracks your steps but also predicts a heart attack before it happens. It’s closer to reality than you think.
Artificial intelligence (AI) integration in healthcare has begun, unlocking many use cases for healthcare providers and patients. The AI healthcare software and hardware market is expected to surpass $34 billion by 2025 globally.
Among the technology and processes indicative of these investments in healthcare include:
- Robotic nurses to aid surgeons.
- Wearables for real-time health monitoring.
- Medical AI chatbots for enhanced self-care.
- Predictive diagnosis based on existing health symptoms.
However, these applications also come with complex challenges. This blog will explore the five challenges in implementing AI in healthcare, their solutions, and their benefits.
Challenges of Using AI in Healthcare
Physicians, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers face many challenges integrating AI into their workflows, from displacement of human labor to data quality issues.
1. Displacement of Human Employees
There is a growing concern that AI could replace healthcare professionals, including job displacement, an outdated skillset, and mental and financial hardships. This potential shift may deter medical groups from adopting AI, causing them to forego many benefits.
The challenge lies in balancing the integration of AI for routine tasks and retaining human expertise for complex patient care, where empathy and critical thinking are irreplaceable.
2. Ethical and Privacy Issues
Obtaining informed consent from patients on how AI systems will use their data can be complex, especially when the public does not fully understand the underlying logic. Some providers might also disregard ethics and use patient data without permission.
Additionally, biases in training data could result in unequal treatment suggestions or misdiagnosis. This discrepancy can disproportionately affect vulnerable groups.
For example, an algorithm that predicts which patients need more intensive care based on healthcare costs rather than actual illness. This incorrectly attributed a lower disease burden to black people.
Furthermore, AI’s ability to identify individuals through large amounts of genome data, even when personal identifiers are removed, poses a risk to patient confidentiality.
3. Lack of Digital Training and Adoption Barriers
A major problem is that medical students receive insufficient training on AI tools and theory. This unpreparedness makes adopting AI difficult during their internships and work.
Another significant barrier is the reluctance of some individuals to embrace digital technologies. Many people still prefer traditional, in-person consultations due to multiple reasons, such as:
- The relatable nature of human interactions.
- Uniqueness neglect by AI.
- The higher perceived value of human doctors, etc.
This resistance is often compounded by a general lack of awareness about AI and its potential benefits, particularly in developing countries.
4. Professional Liabilities
The use of AI systems in decision-making introduces new professional liabilities for healthcare providers, raising questions about ownership if AI initiatives are ineffective. For example, doctors can defer treatment plans to AI without taking responsibility for failed patient examinations.
Furthermore, while machine learning (ML) algorithms can offer personalized treatment recommendations, the lack of transparency in these algorithms complicates individual accountability.
Additionally, reliance on AI could lead to complacency among healthcare professionals, who might defer to computerized decisions without applying their clinical judgment.
5. Interoperability Problems and Data Quality Issues
Data from different sources can often fail to integrate seamlessly. Inconsistency in data formats across systems makes it difficult to access and process information efficiently, creating information silos.
Moreover, poor data quality—such as incomplete or inaccurate records—can lead to flawed AI analysis, ultimately compromising patient care.
Considering these challenges, how can healthcare organizations leverage the full potential of AI?
Solutions to Healthcare AI Problems
Solving the challenges introduced by AI involves a top-down approach. It begins with ensuring that data analysts thoroughly vet datasets used to train AI algorithms to eliminate biases and low-quality data. Transparency with patients regarding AI’s role in their treatment is also crucial to increase adoption.
An example is the Mayo Clinic, which used an algorithm that analyzed over 60,000 images to detect pre-cancerous signs. The algorithm’s accuracy was 91% compared to a human expert’s.
Apart from fixing old datasets, health regulatory bodies, such as the European Medicines Agency (EMA), must collect new, error-free data representing diverse populations to enhance accuracy. OpenAPS is an example of an initiative to create an inclusive open-source collection of systems to treat type 1 diabetes accurately.
Additionally, hospitals should enhance training and education for healthcare professionals. Educational authorities can also extend this specialized training to universities to prepare future practitioners.
This initiative will ensure familiarity with and expertise in AI tools and reduce resistance to their adoption in a professional setting. For example, Intuitive Surgical Ltd’s investment in the da Vinci system has helped doctors in over 5 million surgeries.
Investing in modern data integration tools, such as Astera and Fivetran, with built-in data quality features will also help. These tools remove siloed data and improve interoperability. They also enable data validation to ensure AI algorithms have clean data to analyze.
To effectively integrate AI systems into healthcare, medical institutions must balance leveraging AI and preserving human expertise. Adopting hybrid approaches like human-in-the-loop (HITL) models can help alleviate fears of job displacement. This approach will also ease patient concerns about AI involvement while allowing workers to improve productivity.
And, what are the benefits of successful AI integration within healthcare?
Benefits of AI in Healthcare
AI provides many benefits in the healthcare industry, including improved diagnosis and higher work efficiency:
1. Enhanced Diagnostic Accuracy
AI is transforming diagnostic processes by rapidly analyzing medical images, lab results, and patient data with remarkable precision. This ability to process large amounts of information quickly leads to early, potentially more accurate diagnoses, improving disease management.
2. Personalized Treatment Plans
AI-powered deep learning algorithms can process extensive datasets to create personalized treatment plans tailored to individual patients. This customization improves the efficacy of treatments and minimizes side effects by addressing each patient’s specific needs based on extensive sample data.
3. Operational Efficiency
By automating administrative tasks such as scheduling appointments and billing, AI allows healthcare providers to spend more time and effort on direct patient care. This shift reduces the burden of routine tasks, cuts costs, streamlines operations, and improves overall efficiency.
4. Improved Patient Monitoring
AI-powered tools, including wearable devices, offer continuous patient monitoring, providing real-time alerts and insights. For example, these devices can alert medical services in case of an unusually high heartbeat, which could indicate a physical injury or heart condition.
This proactive approach enables healthcare providers to respond swiftly to changes in a patient’s condition, improving disease management and overall patient care.
Looking Ahead
Emerging technologies, like virtual reality (VR) in medicine, will play a critical role. Many healthcare tasks, from diagnostics to treatment, will be AI-powered, enhancing access to care patient outcomes.
However, healthcare authorities must balance AI’s benefits and challenges to ensure ethical and effective integration into patient care. This will transform the healthcare delivery systems in the long term.
Explore Unite.ai for more resources on AI and healthcare.
