"Soon, it will be hard to imagine a doctor's visit, or a hospital stay that doesn't incorporate AI in numerous ways."
So said Pete Durlach, senior vice president for healthcare strategy and new business development at Nuance, in a conversation at HealthcareITNews with Nathan Eddy.
It’s that time when we look at what happened in the year gone by to get a sense of what lies ahead, and according to Durlach, "With healthy clinical evidence, we'll see AI become more mainstream in various clinical settings, creating a positive feedback loop of more evidence-based research and use in the field.”
In addition, AI and ambient sensing technology will help re-humanize medicine by allowing doctors to focus less on paperwork and administrative functions, and more on patient care.
"As AI becomes more commonplace in the exam room, everything will be voice enabled, people will get used to talking to everything, and doctors will be able to spend 100% of their time focused on the patient, rather than entering data into machines," Durlach predicted. "We will see the exam room of the future where clinical documentation writes itself."
Durlach pointed out that fears that AI will replace doctors and clinicians have dissipated, and among providers the goal now is to figure out how to incorporate AI as another tool to help physicians make the best care decisions possible – effectively augmenting the intelligence of the clinician.
"However, we will still need to protect against phenomena like alert fatigue, which occurs when users who are faced with many low-level alerts, ignore alerts of all levels, thereby missing crucial ones that can affect the health and safety of patients," he cautioned.
Looking ahead, Durlach predicted “the market will see a technology that finds a balance between being too obtrusive while supporting doctors to make the best decisions for their patients as they learn to trust the AI powered suggestions and recommendations.”
Still, while the widespread assumption is investment in AI will continue to rise quickly, some stakeholders caution decision makers to ensure the value of their potential new tools.
"Health system leaders looking to make investments in AI should ask for real-world examples of how the technology is creating ROI for other organizations,” noted Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO and founder of Boston-based Biofourmis.
"So many technologies claim they have an AI component, but often there's a blurred line in which the term AI is used in a broad sense, when the technology that's being described is actually basic analytics or machine learning.”
He noted, for example, a recent study by Brigham & Women's Home Hospital program that employed AI-driven continuous monitoring combined with advanced physiology analytics and related clinical care as a substitute for usual hospital care.
According to Eddy, “the study found that the program--which included an investment in AI-driven predictive analytics as a key component--reduced costs, decreased healthcare use, and lowered readmissions while increasing physical activity compared with usual hospital care.”
Said Rajput, “Those types of outcomes could be replicated by other healthcare organizations, which makes a strong clinical and financial case to invest in that type of AI.”