“Building
a Global Healthcare Platform for 2040”
Introduction
to Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Futurist
Ray Kurzweil has predicted that computers will be as smart as humans
by 2030. By 2045, he claims 'artificial intelligence' systems may be
a billion times more powerful than our unaided 'human intelligence'.
Are you prepared for what this means?
| In computer science, an
ideal Artificial
intelligence
(AI)
system is designed to mimic
cognitive
functions that
humans associate with other human minds, such as “analyzing”,
"learning" and "problem solving". Cognitive
computers are self-learning artificial
intelligence (AI) systems
that can find patterns in massive
collections
of unstructured data and turn it into a presentable form for many
others
to use.
For
more detail, see Wikipedia. |
The
promise of Artificial
Intelligence (AI)
has always been just
beyond
the horizon, not
quite realistic yet still visible to our
imagination through
movies and literature. At
its
inception, AI was
initially deployed
for highly selective defense
or space exploration applications. However,
over time it has steadily advanced and has begun to be utilized in
many other industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing.
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and Data-Driven Medicine
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and data-driven
medicine are
the next
frontier
in the
healthcare
revolution. Electronic
Health Record (EHR) systems have been widely adopted by all major
healthcare institutions across the US over the past decade. Now
state and local Health Information Exchanges (HIE) networks are being
deployed to allow access to data in the EHR systems by healthcare
providers
whenever or wherever it's
needed.
In
the meantime, consumers
have
been
gradually starting to use Personal Health Record (PHR) systems that
contain their patient data from the
various EHR
systems of healthcare institutions where they have been treated. Now
we are seeing the growing
use
of other healthcare technologies that are also gathering
and generating
even
more personal health data,
e.g.
wearable and implantable devices, genomic information
systems
and biorepositories, clinical imaging systems, and more.
It
turns out that Medical
data is the
essential part of today's
comprehensive
healthcare
systems.
However,
processing and analyzing the
massive quantity of data now being generated by the
wide range of converging health information technologies is almost
too much to handle. It is an area the healthcare industry is
struggling to come to grips with as it turns more and more to use of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the means to gain control of the
growing mountain of health related data.
| Roughly
every three years, the amount of medical data on the planet
doubles in size. By 2020, it is expected to double every 73 days. |
It
is time to begin focusing more proactively on the design and
development of a 'global healthcare platform for 2040' built on
artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare
Analysts
predict a tenfold growth of the use of artificial intelligence in
healthcare in the next five years, for everything from cancer
diagnosis to diet tips. According to Frost and Sullivan, healthcare
providers will spend $6 billion per year on artificial intelligence
tools by 2021. Google, IBM and Microsoft are all investing heavily in
healthcare and analysts predict 30 percent of providers will run
cognitive analytics on patient data by 2018. See
Artificial
Intelligence:
There's Still Hope for the Human Race
Early
types of these type
of cognitive systems
built
on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have
already started
entering
the market. These
include
'smart'
triage systems
that
check
patients’ symptoms against massive
health
data
warehouses,
then
advise
patients and providers what
they should do next. Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems
are
also
being used to help consumers
when
buying
health
insurance, to
monitor biometric data from personal fitness trackers, analyzing
genomic data to predict and potential life-threatening diseases, and
much more.
Artificial
Intelligence
(AI)
is advancing rapidly and is in the process of transforming the face
of healthcare.
Just
a few of
the many
areas in which
AI is being used to affect practice management and healthcare
services include
Diagnosis
and Treatment,
Disease
Management, Personal
Health & Wellness,
Utilization
Management & Reimbursement. Read
5
Ways AI is Changing Healthcare.
Other
areas where AI
technology
and
data-driven systems can
be designed, developed, and used to improve healthcare include:
-
Examining
and analyzing genomic
data on
hundreds
of millions of patients.
-
Building
systems that gradually
teach themselves
to become more accurate in its diagnosis.
-
Improving
the speed and accuracy of diagnosis for genetic diseases.
-
Unlocking
the possibility of personalized preventive
and medical
treatment plans.
-
Regularly
monitor patients’ biometric data to see they are complying
with
their treatment plans.
-
Helping
healthcare
providers
deliver
better low-cost,
evidence-driven care to
consumers.
-
Helping
consumers
to
avoid
costly visits to doctor offices and hospitals.
-
Giving
everyone in
the world the equivalent of a
doctor in their pocket – or
smartphone.
Future Scenario:
By 2040, a space-based global artificial intelligence (AI) network
of satellites will be in place that will monitor and help provide
healthcare to people on Earth and in colonies across our solar
system on the Moon, Mars, and other locations. The system will be
linked to massive global health data warehouses storing data from
a wide range of health IT systems, e.g. Electronic Health Record
(EHR) systems, Personal Health Records (PHR), Health Information
Exchange (HIE) networks, wearable fitness trackers, implantable
medical devices, clinical imaging systems, genomic databases and
biorepositories, surgical robots, health research knowledgebases and more.
The
space-based global AI system will monitor and analyze the health
data gathered on all humans in real-time, detecting potential
individual and public health issues. The global AI system will
detect problems, diagnose them, send alerts to patients and their
healthcare providers, diagnose the problems and recommend
treatment plans to resolve the healthcare issue. The system will
also be interfaced to pharmacies, laboratories, health insurers,
public health agencies, and other institutions as needed. The
system will also be able to monitor a patient's progress, as well
as adherence to recommended treatment plans. It will also seek to
anticipate potential healthcare issues and provide preventive
health and predictive health information tailored to each human. |
Current
News & Activities
The
following are a few selected articles you might want to read to get a
better handle on the latest news about current activities related to
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare:
Selected
Issues
The
following are some of the key issues that need to be addressed as we
continue moving forward with the design, development, and use of AI
technologies and data-drive healthcare information systems:
-
Privacy
& Security – This
is always a key issue. When AI systems are turned loose to monitor
all health information systems gathering data on all facets of your
personal health, concerns about who has access to the data and who
it is being shared with are just a few of the issues that must be
adequately addressed upfront.
-
Jobs
- The Bank of
England has predicted
that intelligent machines
might take over 80 million American and 15 million British jobs,
respectively over the next 10 to 20 years. The
healthcare industry will not be immune to this change.
-
Legal
Issues - One of the
most important points of interest that needs to be hammered out
first is the legality of these machines. When a doctor's gross
negligence leads to a misdiagnoses and patient harm, the fault is
placed squarely on the shoulders of the offending physician. But
what happens when a similar situation befalls an AI system? If such
a program were to misdiagnose a patient, who's to blame?
-
Open
Source - Many new 'open source' tools are arriving that can
now run on affordable hardware and allow individuals and small
organizations to perform prodigious data crunching and predictive
tasks. Read about H2O,
OpenAI,
and other machine learning and AI tools being
used in healthcare at Open
Health News. Also,
check out the growing List
of AI Projects on Wikipedia.
| Regenstrief
Institute and Indiana University School of Informatics &
Computing, recently examined open source algorithms and machine
learning tools in public health reporting: The tools bested human
reviewers in detecting cancer using pathology reports and did so
faster than people. Indeed, more and more healthcare systems on
the cutting edge are looking at ways to harness the power of AI,
cognitive computing and machine learning. See Artificial
intelligence and
cognitive
computing - Healthcare IT News |
Recommended
Next Steps
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) systems today can learn in ways society once
thought impossible, which has major implications for multiple
industries – especially the healthcare industry.
It is now
time to begin
focusing more proactively on a
public-private sector collaboration to
design and develop a 'global healthcare platform for 2040' built on
artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It's time to begin designing Health 4.0
Many
countries are beginning to support the idea of having a global
healthcare network of data centers coupled with a state-of-the-art AI
technology platform that will allow sort through all the data,
standardize it, and put it into a form that is useful and easily
understood by patients, healthcare providers, healthcare insurers,
researchers, and other individuals and organizations.
Any
such global effort should keep in mind the key management strategies
for success in the 21st
century – Collaboration, Open Solutions, and continuous Innovation
(COSI). Building such a
global solution will require a massive global public-private sector
partnership. Think of all the
components that will need to converge to compose such a global
solution – e.g. healthcare technologies, research, knowledge,
organizations, and more.
One
final note, advances in AI and technology are helping create a
futuristic human-to-machine and machine-to-human interaction that can
best be described as an 'Invisible' User Interface (IUI) of
the future that simply works non-stop in the background to monitor
and improve health for everyone. It will just be there – serving
mankind.
Recommended
Links
Companies
Systems
& Projects
News
Sites
|
Associations
Journals
|
