The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to healthcare systems around the world, but one way of summing it all up may be to say it has forced healthcare stakeholders to prioritize like never before.
Who has the virus? Who’s the sickest? What are the options? What other patients must be told, with utmost reluctance, that they’ll have to wait?
In a recent commentary, Ohad Arazi, CEO of Zebra Medical Vision, an imaging platform provider, observed that, like it or not, many of the constraints put on the healthcare system by the pandemic won’t be going away any time soon, largely because of the pent-up demand that has amassed as millions of patients have seen their treatments put on hold to make space for those struggling with COVID-19.
“The industry will need to be innovative to quickly provide these essential services as we overcome the peak of the COVID-19 crisis,” Arazi says, but he believes that AI is well-poised to provide the support necessary to ensure that healthcare services are once again available to the full range of waiting patients.
“While AI can’t yet fight the coronavirus directly,” he says, “it can play a central role in creating the efficiency needed for healthcare professionals to get to as many cases possible, especially post-COVID-19. AI can assist clinicians by prioritizing cases, allowing clinicians to focus on what matters most, and creating a safety net to ensure critical results and incidental findings are not missed.”
In his view, AI-powered healthcare solutions are available to “offer concrete results, including reducing turnaround time for head CT scans and uncovering patients at risk of cardiovascular disease due to a build up of coronary calcium, as well as detect compression fractures that are impacting the patients’ quality of life. A whopping 70 percent of compression fractures go undiagnosed globally—a percentage, for example, that can be reduced with the assistance of AI technology’s ability to streamline processes.”
The key to it all, Arazi says, is prioritization, just as much after the pandemic wanes as it has been during the present struggle. And just as early diagnosis has emerged as a key challenge in the struggle against the coronavirus, so, too, will early and quick prioritization be the key to helping healthcare providers determine how best to work through the backlog of patients that has built up as the pandemic has consumed the stakeholders’ attention.
It will be a daunting task, Arazi concedes, but with the effective use of AI, those on the frontlines of healthcare should be well-positioned to meet the challenges that are sure to follow as the pandemic is brought under control.