Medicine has definitely come a long way from the days of the great American painter Norman Rockwell. He was active in the mid-20th century. He made many paintings–my relatives and friends have replicas of them in their houses, of doctors making traditional house calls and diagnosing patients. American medicine has definitely come a long way since then.
It’s about to advance even further with the rollout and integration of advanced AI and LLM tools. I will explain the advancements and the impact they will have on patients and doctors in the future.
Doctors Can Diagnose Patients Faster
When I say faster, I mean in a few seconds. Earlier, in the pre-AI 20th and early 21st centuries, doctors spent a few to many hours listening to patient complaints, examining them thoroughly, and researching their ailments and possible cures. Then they formulated manual treatment plans. Sure, it saved many lives, but it was painstakingly long and subject to human errors.
In the post-pandemic era, doctors can do all of the steps I mentioned above in under 20 seconds. Amazing, huh? That means doctors can think of possible causes of ailments and diagnose all of them while still in appointments with their patients. If you guessed that the quality of patient care is going to improve dramatically and rapidly, you’re absolutely right.
How Will AI Improve American Medicine
AI tools have already been through a pilot program. It happened during the pandemic. Back then, doctors used more primitive versions of AI tools to spot and get rid of vaccine ‘hallucinations’ on social media platforms. But AI and LLM technologies got their first real tests in global medicine because they were instrumental in speeding up vaccine developments and deployments.
They helped doctors track the spread of COVID among certain populations. Doctors use AI tools to help determine which sections of the population were at greatest risk. AI tools helped them better predict who would get the virus next.
These achievements, though in their infantile stage, showed the great potential that AI tools had in improving patient outcomes and American healthcare. That’s why many companies began to invest heavily in the National AI Research Resource Pilot Program. Microsoft, for example, invested $20 million in the program last year.
Doctors hope to help patients live longer, healthier, and better-quality lives by using AI to develop innovative and radical treatment techniques. AI technologies and tools use Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to understand and process spoken human languages. So, they can follow and respond to orders and verbal prompts from healthcare providers.
AI tools operate on Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. These tools utilise algorithms to learn how healthcare providers think, identify patterns in complex data points, and make useful predictions based on these patterns.
Doctors Will Diagnose Patients Better
Doctors are educated, so you would think that they would never make the wrong diagnosis with a patient. And while not common, misdiagnoses do happen. It’s because doctors, like all humans, can make mistakes. But enter AI tools, which are mechanical. They don’t make simple or large errors, primarily because they are not human.
Healthcare professionals are already using various AI tools to analyze symptoms better and get more accurate diagnoses. They can use this information for more effective and tailored treatments. Health workers can more accurately predict which patients are at greater risk for particular ailments and issues.
Let me explain exactly how health professionals make more accurate diagnoses with AI. AI tools have intelligent symptom checkers. These are a set of questions that are specific to a particular condition. The intelligent symptom checkers work well at gathering comprehensive answers about medical conditions and their causes.
The AI tools formulate an effective treatment plan for patients to help them heal faster and better. Google’s DeepMind Health, for example, uses an AI system to analyze eye images to detect undiagnosed diabetic retinopathy early on before it can cause blindness.
Medicines Will Be Amazingly Effective Because They Will Be Personalized
Doctors and other healthcare professionals are already using AI tools to analyze various complex data points and prescribe customized and effective medicines and treatment plans. Many AI tools use deep learning models which analyze a lot of conventional and genetic patient data and lifestyle patterns to analyze appropriate research and formulate the best treatments in a few minutes.
Merative is a popular AI-powered analytics platform that’s revolutionizing the treatment process. It was previously referred to as IBM Watson Health. Merative excels at helping healthcare workers diagnose patients faster and better, craft more effective treatment plans, and monitor patients better by analyzing large clinical and patient databases. It runs off of descriptive and analytical AI capabilities to do its job.
On a separate note, researchers are discovering that they can use specialized AI algorithms to track patient vital signs, lab results, and other key variables to predict which patients are most likely to become septic (before they develop the serious condition).
Doctors Will Get Much More Efficient at Detecting and Diagnosing Diseases
Clinicians use advanced imaging tools to diagnose diseases faster (while they are still in the early stage of development) and treat them better (thereby saving more lives). For example, many doctors use the Clinical Histopathology Imaging Evaluation Foundation (CHIEF) AI model to help them better analyze mammogram images and detect breast cancer cases earlier when survival rates are higher.
CHIEF is successful because it was initially trained on 15 million unlabeled images. It learned how to tell images of different breast tissue samples apart when it was trained on 60,000 slides of various types of organ tissues–breast, brain, lung, and prostate. It analyzed both the entire images and different sections of the slides while drawing its own accurate conclusions.
Some of these advanced AI tools can even analyze, interpret, and successfully diagnose virtual biopsies. That helps clinicians make better diagnoses and more effective treatment plans by allowing them to understand various cancerous tumors’ genetic traits and phenotypes. Doctors can save more lives when they can define and understand the nature of very aggressive cancers better.
Healthcare workers get some help from a surprising device–the smartphone and similar portable devices. Dermatologists and ophthalmologists use the devices’ AI tools to help them analyze and classify images. That’s crucial when they’re trying to determine if a particular lump or mass is benign or malignant based on certain somewhat fuzzy images.
AI tools are good at spotting subtle differences in images–where details matter–a tired doctor may accidentally miss these discrepancies. A meta analysis published last year studied doctors who made diagnoses with and without AI tools. Doctors who used AI tools made significantly more accurate diagnoses than those who didn’t.
Doctors could even diagnose patients more effectively through telehealth appointments using these AI tools.
There Will Be Less Paperwork
You may welcome that if you are a patient. You’ll spend less time with the receptionist and support staff at the front desk. There will be fewer forms for you to fill out as well. You’ll spend more time with your doctor getting answers to serious medical issues. There are AI tools on the market that help doctors record notes and review medical records faster.
They have more time and energy for their patients. Dax Copilot is one such tool. Not only does it automatically document patient visits by recording voice conversations and interactions, but it also integrates with Epic. Doctors can generate and file records of visits faster, making the entire ‘doctor’s visit’ faster and more efficient.
Doctor’s Visits Will Be More Productive
They will be more pleasant as well. Gone are the days when doctors carried around physical folders full of papers that could get lost easily. They use advanced AI tools to streamline the diagnoses and treatment steps. That saves lives and helps patients live longer. In the end, both doctors and patients are much happier.