Mental Health

How AI Is Making Healthcare Personal

By Staff Reporter | Update Date: May 05, 2019 10:45 PM EDT

Intelligent machines are becoming a more central aspect of our lives on a daily basis, with AI having already ingrained itself into how modern hospitals and healthcare providers deliver positive patient solutions. Despite the fact that AI is more important now than ever before, however, many in the public still now very little about how these intelligent machines are coming to deliver personalized healthcare that's specifically tailored for you.

Hospitals and medical researchers around the country are already proving that AI has a promising role to play in healthcare. Here's a breakdown of how AI is making healthcare personal, and the methods by which an intelligent machine will make your future hospital visits more customized.

AI is supercharging precision medicine

Few areas of the medical industry are finding themselves as upended by the injection of intelligent machines into the equation as precision medicine, or the approach to patient care where doctors can personalize the treatment to match the patient in question. Historically, precision medicine has been particularly important when it comes to certain diseases that are hereditary and thus more likely to show up in certain patients than in others. These days, however, AI is helping make precision medicine the go-to-means by which all healthcare professionals can address the needs of their patients. This approach may even help lower healthcare services insurance costs.

A recent study into the role of AI in precision medicine details how practicing medicine has always been highly dependent on the collection of huge sums of patient information. If doctors don't know what's going on inside of your body or what your medical history is, after all, they'll be hard pressed to help you in any meaningful way. In the future, though, medical treatment is going to become more data-driven than ever before, with massive patient portfolios being assembled by clever software programs that know more about you than you yourself may.

In a way, it's easy to imagine the field of precision medicine morphing from a specialized practice only useful to a select few patients into a generalized form of treatment that everyone can expect. After all, with the help of intelligent software, doctors can learn more about patients and diagnose them with greater accuracy than ever before. A recent review of how AI is transforming diagnostic imaging found that intelligent software is much more capable of detecting certain patterns than humans are, and can supercharge the ability of medical professionals to deliver news to patients sooner than ever before, which means that treatment can be started right away.

AI won't replace doctors

Despite all of these impressive achievements brought about by the rise of AI, many patients and healthcare providers alike continue to live in fear of intelligent machines that they worry will come to replace them in all elements of life. In reality, though, there are few reasons to believe that AI will supplant humans and plenty of reasons to believe that they won't replace doctors so much as work alongside of them. These intelligent machines are still only that - machines - at the end of the day, meaning they can't take responsibility when things go wrong or make the sudden calls that human experts are required for. Thus, you can sleep soundly that AI won't replace doctors.

It will make them better than ever before, though, largely by automating the more mundane aspects of medical treatment and cutting down on things like paperwork. This will free up human experts to spend more time with patients or give them additional opportunities to review and study patient data, which can offer useful insights into how to save lives. Thus, by taking care of the busy-work that engulfs many hospital staffers, AI will be making healthcare more personal by delivering you more one-on-one time with the experts you come to know and trust.

Outside of more serious medical treatments and diagnostics, AI will also help make healthcare personal by making your stay in a hospital more enjoyable. Meridian Health is currently experimenting with a groundbreaking Concierge Care program that aims to deliver a better guest experiment when it comes to nonmedical needs like reading materials or hotel reservations. In the future, family members and close friends of those in the hospital will find it easy to stay in touch with their injured loved ones because an AI program helps them book a local room in an otherwise busy city. All of this is only the start, too, as the ways that AI makes healthcare more personal are going to become more complex as the algorithms themselves do.

Human experts aren't going anywhere anytime soon, so don't fear that hospitals will be entirely operated by robots in the near-future. As it turns out, the introduction of artificial intelligence into the healthcare industry has made things more efficient and customizable than ever before. Whether you're a patient in need of help or a doctor trying to deliver it, AI going to make your next stay in a hospital personal and unique.

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