Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving a monumental shift across industries, and healthcare is at the forefront of this transformation. Tanvi Lall, a Berkeley Haas MBA and strategic leader at People+ai, offers a unique perspective on how AI is poised to revolutionize healthcare delivery and what the future holds for this critical sector. Her insights provide a roadmap for navigating both the opportunities and challenges of integrating AI into healthcare.

Bridging the Gap Between AI Hype and Reality

After eight years leading the development and commercialization of molecular diagnostics for infectious diseases, with a background as an investor and strategist at Visby Medical, Lall has witnessed firsthand the limitations of traditional life sciences approaches, which often rely on time-consuming laboratory trials. She believes the healthcare industry is only beginning to tap into the full potential of software, data science, and particularly generative AI. With AI’s multilingual capabilities, Lal sees unprecedented possibilities to revolutionize healthcare delivery—especially in diverse, multi-lingual countries.

However, she is quick to note that practical AI deployment in healthcare remains complex. “You cannot develop a product or technology without truly understanding the nuances of the stakeholders’ needs,” says Lall. The complexity lies in healthcare’s unique structure, where the payer, operator, and beneficiary of a technology are often different entities. Success, she argues, depends on a deep understanding of all three perspectives.

Key Strategies for AI Integration in Healthcare

For healthcare organizations looking to leverage AI effectively, Lall highlights several key strategies:

1. Clear Communication: Healthcare is traditionally conservative, especially when it comes to adopting new technologies. Organizations need to craft clear, transparent narratives around their AI solutions, addressing concerns about privacy, security, and data handling.
2. User-Centric Development: The development process must involve direct engagement with end-users in their real-world environments. For example, AI solutions designed for physicians should be tested in clinics and offices to ensure they fit seamlessly into existing workflows.
3. Ethical Considerations: The handling of sensitive patient data is paramount. Organizations must prioritize data privacy and consent management while backing AI tools with clinical validation through rigorous trials.

Emerging Opportunities and Evolving Roles

AI is not just a tool for innovation; it’s reshaping roles and creating new opportunities within healthcare:

• Localized Training: AI can help create personalized training materials tailored to users’ native languages and cultural contexts, making AI adoption more accessible across diverse populations.
• Productivity Tools for Providers: AI tools can enhance healthcare providers’ efficiency, enabling them to spend more time on complex decision-making and patient care.
• Streamlining Administration: By automating routine administrative tasks, AI allows healthcare professionals to focus more on delivering quality care.

The Future of AI in Healthcare: Personalized Medicine and Drug Discovery

Lal identifies two game-changing trends in healthcare AI:

• Personalized Medicine: AI’s ability to create holistic patient profiles by combining diagnostic data with lifestyle indicators is revolutionizing personalized treatment plans. In a country like India, where cultural and dietary differences play significant roles in health outcomes, AI can be particularly impactful.
• Drug Discovery: AI’s computational power is accelerating the exploration of drug combinations and molecular interactions, paving the way for faster and more efficient drug development.

Transforming Patient-Provider Relationships with AI

AI is also reshaping how patients interact with healthcare providers:

• AI-Powered Consultations: AI-driven systems can conduct preliminary consultations by gathering medical history and symptoms, streamlining the diagnostic process.
• Post-Consultation Support: Patients can receive AI-assisted guidance for medication and treatment follow-ups, ensuring they adhere to their care plans effectively.
• Improved Screening: AI is enhancing traditional screening processes, allowing for more accurate and timely diagnoses.

Advice for Innovators: Building Diverse Teams

For those looking to innovate in healthcare AI, Lall stresses the importance of building diverse teams that go beyond just engineers. She advises innovators to include healthcare professionals and end-users in the development process from the beginning. “Curate a core team that brings varied perspectives, and gather early feedback from the community,” she suggests. This approach ensures that solutions are not only technologically advanced but also practical and effective in real-world settings.

AI’s role in healthcare is both transformative and complex. As the technology continues to evolve, success will depend on balancing cutting-edge innovation with ethical considerations and a deep focus on user needs. By embracing this approach, AI has the potential to significantly enhance healthcare accessibility, efficiency, and outcomes—ultimately leading to better care for patients worldwide.

Authors Biography

Tanvi Lall is the Director of Strategy at People+ai and former Director of Program Management at Visby Medical, with prior roles at Berkeley Impact Venture Partners and Biocon. She holds an M.Sc. in Biotechnology and Management from Carnegie Mellon and an MBA from UC Berkeley, advising on biotechnology careers.

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Developing Countries:

In developing countries, ChatGPT can help improve access to healthcare by providing remote consultations and diagnostics. For example, patients in rural areas may not have access to specialized doctors or medical facilities. ChatGPT can be used to provide remote consultations and connect patients with the appropriate medical professionals.

In addition, ChatGPT can be used to develop predictive models to identify outbreaks of diseases and track the spread of infectious diseases in real-time. This can help public health officials and medical professionals to respond quickly and effectively to prevent the spread of diseases.

One example of this is the use of ChatGPT to diagnose COVID-19. In collaboration with publicly and privately funded hospitals in such countries, chatbots have been developed that could assess a person’s risk of COVID-19 based on their symptoms and travel history. This helped to ease the burden on healthcare workers and enabled more people to access testing and care.

Third World Countries:

In third world countries, ChatGPT can help address the shortage of medical professionals and lack of access to healthcare. ChatGPT can be used to provide basic health information, such as how to prevent diseases, manage chronic conditions, and address common health concerns. Additionally, ChatGPT can be used to develop predictive models to identify outbreaks of diseases and track the spread of infectious diseases in real-time.

One example of this is the use of ChatGPT in African countries to provide health information to people living in remote areas. In collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), a chatbot was developed that could provide information on a range of health topics, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, and maternal health. This helped to improve access to healthcare in areas where medical professionals are scarce.

Overall, ChatGPT and other language models have the potential to transform healthcare systems around the world by improving access to healthcare, enhancing the quality of care, and advancing medical research. However, it is important to consider the ethical and privacy implications of using AI in healthcare and ensure that these technologies are developed and deployed in a responsible manner.

“Composed by: Ela Vashishtha, a healthcare analytics and planning leader at Texas Health Resources, USA, is driving data analytics and process improvement initiatives to address complex business challenges in healthcare. With a strong track record, she has successfully streamlined operations and improved healthcare efficiencies. Managing operational excellence for over 27 hospitals, she has spearheaded the implementation of real-time data monitoring and digital products, such as telehealth and remote patient monitoring. Ela’s expertise also includes the use of predictive tools for COVID and flu, as well as enhancing hospital quality indicators.”

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Technology has been at the heart of the healthcare revolution for years. The evolution of the internet, mobile networks, smart devices, etc., have significantly changed the process of delivering patient care. Gone are the days when people had to wait for hours for a 15-minute doctor consultation. Today, doctor consultation is just a matter of a phone call. Patients can now have physician consultations from the convenience of their homes. And this is just one example of how much technology has transformed healthcare. Digital health and AI is one of the hot topics that people within and outside of the healthcare industry have been talking about recently. This article discusses how AI and digital health is fuelling the next healthcare revolution while redefining healthcare delivery.

What is digital health?

Digital health is a multidisciplinary concept that uses communication and information technologies to help health systems deliver affordable and good-quality care. Digital health also enables healthcare institutions to be efficient and sustainable. Telehealth, mhealth, and wearable devices used to monitor patient status are some of the real-time examples of digital health.

AI or Artificial Intelligence

AI is one of the greatest breakthrough technologies that is changing our everyday life experiences, right from avoiding traffic and online shopping to hospital experiences. While we are already experiencing AI-induced changes in our lives, like personalized movie or music recommendations, and voice-controlled personal assistants such as Alexa and Siri, let us dive in to understand how AI and digital health is transforming the healthcare industry and patient care.

AI can ease the process of detecting invalid claims and accelerate the pace of claim – assessments, processing, approval, and payment through automation.

How AI and digital health is transforming healthcare

1. Optimized workflow scheduling and case prioritization

Workflow management and case prioritization are highly critical in the healthcare domain, as a patient’s life is at stake. The sooner the diagnosis, the earlier the treatment. AI and ML algorithms can aid in optimizing workflow, prioritizing cases, and managing patient flow. Healthcare professionals can navigate hundreds of medical records and identify critical and non-critical cases within seconds using AI and ML algorithms. This will help physicians and radiologists to focus on critical cases on priority and create workflows and patient flows accordingly. Furthermore, AI can also help in automating time-consuming manual tasks like patient data entry, medical claim scrubbing, etc. AI can also facilitate personalized responses to EHR searches.

2. Quick drug discovery

It takes years, or even decades, to synthesize the appropriate drug for an illness. Chickenpox, for instance, was identified in the 1950s. But it took almost four decades to discover the right vaccine for the illness. With AI, drugs for contagious diseases can be discovered and synthesized within months, if not days. A real-time example of how AI can speed up the drug discovery process is the recent pandemic, COVID-19. Almost within a year of the COVID-19 outburst, a relevant vaccine was developed and distributed across the globe with the help of AI. 

3. Quantitative imaging analysis and reporting

Have you ever got a different diagnosis from different doctors for the same problem? If yes, then you probably might have thought which one of the diagnoses is correct. Such different diagnosis from different doctors is primarily due to subjective analysis and reporting. Almost all medical images are studied in a subjective manner – based on the radiologist or physician’s personal opinions, point of view, and interpretations – and have often led to diagnostic errors and incorrect/unnecessary treatment. The shortcomings of subjective analysis and reporting can be overcome only through quantitative imaging analysis and objective reporting.

Quantitative imaging analysis, as the name suggests, is the process of measuring all the elements in a medical image and comparing it against anatomical values to identify deformities and determine the severity of illness. Reports generated from quantitative imaging analysis are known as objective reports and hold detailed information about every element of the scanned body part, including their measurements. However, performing quantitative imaging analysis and generating objective reports is a time-consuming task, which is why most health centers are unable to perform them. But AI can help health institutions perform quantitative imaging analysis quickly and accurately. 

4. Robot-assisted surgery & Virtual nursing assistant

Robot-assisted surgery enabled by AI can help surgeons to perform complex procedures with increased precision, flexibility, and control as compared to conventional techniques. Robot-assisted surgery is gaining more prominence in healthcare and the market size of robotic surgery is expected to cross $7 billion by 2025. Similar to robot-assisted surgery, AI-powered robots can serve as virtual assistants to provide 24/7 support for chronic conditions, monitor patient status, check medication intake, and schedule doctors’ appointments, just the way a nurse practitioner would do.

5. Fraud detection

AI can help in ensuring the security of patient data, which is highly sensitive and at the heart of providing secured and personalized patient care. Also, AI can ease the process of detecting invalid claims and accelerate the pace of claim – assessments, processing, approval, and payment through automation.

According to a report, AI adoption can help US healthcare providers save nearly USD 150 billion by 2025.

6. Precision medicine

Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, is a medical model where healthcare is customized according to the genetics, lifestyle, and environment of a person. Precision medicine is the exact opposite of the one-drug-fits-all medical model. Numerous studies and experiments have been carried out to understand the potential of AI in precision medicine. And in most cases, AI has been able to classify and solve precision medicine problems in aspects like disease detection and prediction, treatment optimization, etc. Most healthcare providers and professionals believe that AI will take precision medicine to the next level and improve the levels of accuracy and prediction in patient outcomes. They also believe that AI can help in making precision medicine affordable and available to people from rural areas.

Summing Up

AI and digital health are not only beneficial for patients but also providers. Many stakeholders and industry leaders posit that the digital health and AI market is growing with a great potential for ROI. According to a report, AI adoption can help US healthcare providers save nearly USD 150 billion by 2025. Not just that, with medical imaging data growing abundantly and projected to double by the next decade, AI will be the only solution to handle the healthcare data explosion.

Studies state that the growth of AI in healthcare will be driven by the increasing volume of data. Matter of fact, numerous health systems have started embracing AI applications not just in patient-facing clinical processes, but also in diagnostic workflows and tasks associated with medical images. According to a KPMG survey, 89% of respondents stated that AI is already enhancing the efficiency of their systems. 

Many health tech firms are moving from cancer diagnosis and focusing on creating AI algorithms for other health issues like chronic neck and back pain. Synapsica, for instance, is a leading AI health tech firm that has successfully built AI tools for spine problems and injuries. Using Synapsica’s AI tools, Spindle and SpindleX, radiologists can perform quantitative imaging analysis and generate objective reports within minutes. The healthcare industry is one of those industries that transform almost every decade. The current healthcare industry is highly different from what it was a decade ago and will be highly different from what it is now in the next decade. And AI and digital health will be the key drivers of the next healthcare revolution.

Composed by: “Dr. Cherian is presently associated with AIIMS, New Delhi. He is leading all medical operations, research and product vision for Artificial Intelligence. He has established many startup teams for pan-India operations.”

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