Unexpected challenges have a way of driving the rapid adoption of new technology, and when it comes to AI in healthcare the COVID-19 pandemic is certainly no exception.

As our colleague Ben Harris summed it up recently at HealthcareIT News, as healthcare leaders scramble to stop the spread of the coronavirus, “(w)hole business models and strategies became outdated and entirely new approaches have replaced them.”

Harris was reporting on a recent HIMSS20 Digital presentation in which three industry leaders –  Aashima Gupta, Director, Global Healthcare Solutions, Google Cloud, Google, Inc; Nassib Chamoun, CEO of the Health Data Analytics Institute, and Peter Durlach, SVP for Strategy & New Business Development at Nuance Communications – discussed how AI is being quickly deployed on the front lines of the pandemic battle.

For example, Aashima Gupta described how telehealth tools have been tapped to “to keep patients safe at home if they can be at home,” while Durlach pointed to the use of AI to help reduce the administrative burdens that have piled up as providers have have had to diagnose and treat an exploding patient population.

According to Harris, “He pointed to areas such as documentation, where automatic creation of clinical notes gives caregivers more time to spend with patients and also makes their workload less burdensome.”

Durlach also pointed out that by reducing the administrative burden of paperwork, which studies show doctors do more per hour than they do seeing patients, “AI can automate a process that sucks physician time and saps their will.”

Closer to the clinical side of the pandemic crush, Nassib Chamoun outlined the importance of effective data organization to the help providers make efficient decisions. 

"You can't just dump data," he pointed out. “You have to make it legible and analyzable. Allow the clinician to rapidly focus on areas of concern.”

Other roles for AI in the current crisis, the panelists noted, include determining how best to anticipate and avoid shortages of basic PPE like masks and ventilators and easing the strain on physicians.

Durlach said AI is being used to "keep physicians distant from the danger if they can be, but to also increase the number of patients they can see, or to have some down time," to avoid physician burnout.