The world today is evolving at a fast pace as new-age technologies are transforming the industrial sector. Very relevant technology is Artificial intelligence (AI). AI has to be a professional technological tool in the modern-day world. The health sector is being affected positively by the adoption of AI. And this has improved the lives of humans, making us healthier and increasing life expectancy. In this article, we will be focusing on how AI is improving the healthcare world and the technological tools used by healthcare institutions nowadays.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the development of systems– machines or devices– equipped with the intellectual proficiency of humans such that the system can reason, discover meaning, or learn from experience all by itself. Some applications of AI are; natural language processing, expert systems, machine vision, and speech recognition.
The major importance of AI is that it reduces human effort as much as possible and increases work efficiency with high precision and accuracy.
How AI is changing the World of Healthcare
AI has helped develop different tools to improve the healthcare sector. Some of these technological tools used today include:
- Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
- Telemedicine/Tele-health
- Remote Patient Monitoring Devices
- Clinical Diagnosing Machine
- Robot Doctors
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Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
Through EHRs, AI has made patients’ health records more precise, safe, and available when needed. EHRs are used to save patients’ medical history, diagnosis, medications, treatment plans, radiology images, allergies, immunization dates, and laboratory and test results. The main feature of EHRs is that when patients’ health information is collected in the digital format, other health care organizations can easily access it for use. This allows faster transfer of health information of patients.
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Tele-medicine/Tele-health
With the use of telecommunication technologies, the healthcare world can be expanded. Telehealth has helped reach out to people at places where they lack health facilities. This has assisted, most especially, in rural areas where access to the hospital is lacking. With AI technology on Telemedicine, patients can use their computer to meet a doctor virtually. Also, the cost of meeting a doctor virtually through Telehealth is affordable. Therefore, a lower mortality rate is experienced in areas without health facilities.
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Remote Patient Monitoring Devices
Another very essential tool of AI inventory is the remote monitoring tool. This device allows patients to monitor their health at home. With its help, unnecessary visitations to the doctors are reduced, and money is saved. It also allows patients with chronic illnesses to monitor their health from a distance and automatically sends data to remote health centers. This has made work much easier for medical professionals. An example of a reliable remote patient monitoring device provider is 100Plus.
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Clinical Diagnosing Machine
Through AI intervention, patient diagnosis has become easier, faster, and precise compared to doctors’ diagnoses. The clinical diagnosing machine is phenomenal when detecting diseases from image-based test results. Also, with AI, it is possible to detect chronic issues at an early stage. For example, detecting cancer cells at an early stage is possible with AI algorithms, and it will also provide ways to stop its growth. According to Forbes, the accuracy in AI algorithms is at an average of 87%, meaning diagnosis errors detected in the past have been greatly reduced.
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Robot Doctors
Robot doctors assist doctors in their daily medical routine in hospitals. They don’t displace doctors as you might think, but they work with them on specific tasks to give accurate results. AI-driven robots perfectly do human work, with few errors detected. Surgical robots’ precision and accuracy during operation rivals the best-skilled surgeons. These intelligent robots also play the roles of transporting and recovery units. They transport medical supplies by navigating the hospital pathway to the delivery point.
Conclusion
AI has impacted almost every sector with the health sector not being an exception. With this new technology, the progress in the health sector is massive and impressive. As artificial intelligence is evolving, there is a high tendency for improvement and new sophisticated applications are put into use. However, some challenges such as technical know-how for AI systems, patients’ comfort with robot assistance, etc., are still being encountered. AI is significantly growing daily, mitigating data risks and improving efficiency in inpatient recovery. With this technology, a cheaper and more effective healthcare system is being achieved on a much larger scale.
