Will 2019 be the year of AI in healthcare?

That may seem a somewhat odd question, given that AI has been making inroads into healthcare for some time, but as Yann Fleureau, co-founder and CEO of Cardiologs, a provider of AI ECG solutions for cardiologists, recently summed it up at Healthcare Finance News, 2017 and 2018 were the years when AI companies leapt an array of regulatory hurdles, and 2019 will be the year when providers and patients really begin to see the results.

According to Fleureau, one of the reasons the AI market take off in healthcare is that it holds the potential to automate mundane reporting requirements, which have distracted clinicians from patient care and forced them to spend more of their working hours reviewing information that could be better left to machine learning.

"Caregivers spend most of their time reviewing garbage," said Fleureau. "That's really what's mundane. The tedious part of their job is to review data, which does not benefit patients.

"By bringing a deep learning-enabled technology which is radically superior, you demonstrate you have the same level of safety -- no false negatives -- while reducing the administrative burden. You save caregivers' time so they can focus on the true items that require medical attention.”

But backend, administrative tasks aren’t the only chores AI and machine learning will expedite.

Workflow improvement and drug discovery are two use cases for AI that will become even more evident as AI in healthcare advances, said Fleureau. As for improved clinical support, he thinks the areas most primed to receive the technology will likely be imaging and diagnostics.

Deep learning technology was developed largely for those use cases, he explained, so most of the companies that have broken through the regulatory barrier so far have been imaging- and diagnostic-centric.

Teaching hospitals will likely be the first to use the technology in a pervasive way, said Fleureau, because they're typically based in urban areas and have more patient flow.

"From my perspective they will use it first, because it's both in the interest of the innovators, and it's the traditional way to bring products to market," he noted. "Caregivers and AI speak the same language, which is the language of statistics. Pretty much anywhere there is data, there will be AI."