“Generative AI is going to save a lot of time. It’s going to prevent physician burnout. It’s going to reduce administrative overload,” says Vish Anantraman, chief technology officer at Mayo Clinic. It’s easy to see how that’s possible.
Still, if you’ve looked at AI in any capacity these past few months, you might have your own opinion on how generative AI will change healthcare in the future.
Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence that produces all types of content based on patterns learned from existing content. In healthcare, that can mean a lot of things:
Diagnosing
Doctors and healthcare providers can query large data sets to make more timely and accurate diagnoses, which will help them devise better treatment plans for their patients.
Personalized medicine
Treatments and outcomes are always different for each patient, even when a healthcare provider specializes in a niche field. Generative AI can help customize and refine treatment plans as well as create follow-up procedures that boost successful outcomes.
Treatments
Finding new drug regimens and treatment plans can take time. That can burden medical staff and cause them to miss effective protocols that may help their patients. AI can locate clinical trials and new treatments that might impact the health of their patients.
Interpret data
Sometimes, the best medical care comes from investigation work. AI makes that job more manageable. It allows a person to take unstructured medical data and make sense of the outcomes. It analyzes and detects things faster than a human ever could.
Better care
In some circumstances, a robot is better at diving into the details. It can help with surgical operations, deliver assistance and insight throughout a procedure, and provide more personalized care.
Avoid medical errors
Generative AI can analyze data and correct mistakes in charts and medical records. It can provide more precise analysis to ensure proper treatments and protocols. It does all this without recovering from a bad night’s sleep or needing a morning coffee.
Generative AI isn’t without its challenges
Generative AI is coming on strong. But it doesn’t take a lot of contemplation to come up with significant downsides that can have a devastating impact on health.
By their own accord, AI tools will state that they hallucinate. This is where AI provides a confident response that doesn’t seem justified by the data. For a financial report, it would have no problem plucking a number from thin air and including it in the data. For healthcare, that could create deadly results.
AI tools also raise issues about putting patient data at risk and protecting patient privacy. It can be susceptible to bias and discrimination, especially when it provides results that don’t fully represent the population it’s serving.
The future is here
Love it or hate it, generative AI is now a part of our world. We see new uses for it every day. If you haven’t thought of how it will be incorporated into your own practice, maybe now is the time.
How can you use it to improve your practice?
For IT Strategy, Cloud Conversion, or Help Desk Services reach out to us at Silver Linings Technology 360-450-4759.
