AI and its technology are here to stay, destined to become increasingly authentic in providing solutions across various facets of our lives. The potential of generative AI in healthcare, in particular, has garnered significant attention. Its newfound generative capabilities, automating tasks, processing unstructured information, improving patient care, and more, are slowly fostering a sustainable healthcare environment.
AI has been touted to enhance several aspects of the healthcare segment. The buzzword - Generative AI, holds the value chain for a rapidly evolving landscape. While AI, when used alone, is limited to making healthcare predictions based on structured data, healthcare companies have found that Generative AI, with its advanced capabilities and deeper insights, can effectively create new content and keep up with the rising demand for high-quality healthcare services. Combining both is transformative, building a new powerful model that improves health and healthcare.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a deep machine-learning model that analyzes data patterns and generates insights and information based on them, such as images, text, audio, as well as synthetic data. This system comprises various AI algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) techniques that allow systems and devices to recognize, understand, and generate information.
In healthcare, Generative AI promises improvement in several processes and addresses challenges. It can pave the way for timely disease diagnosis, provide tailored treatment to patients, offer real-time support using chatbots, post-treatment monitoring, and much more.
Application of Generative AI in Healthcare
Automating Workflows
Streamlining backend operations and administrative tasks can be very useful in freeing up healthcare providers, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks. Gen AI and its capabilities can be leveraged to automate administrative tasks like appointment scheduling, medical billing and claim processing, record-keeping, data entry, data extraction, and much more. It can help streamline workflows and increase efficiency across companies.
Medical Imaging
Medical imaging holds significant importance in understanding the patient’s medical condition. It makes use of a visual representation of the internal structure of the patient’s body and aids in clinical analysis, including monitoring treatment and planning surgeries. These images are typically generated through X-rays, CT scans, MRI, ultrasound, and PET. While non-invasive, it is not without challenges. For one, complex datasets require expert understanding, and sometimes, even after that, images are constructed in low resolution.
Gen AI models prove to be instrumental in medical imaging. It can enhance the quality of images, reduce noise, produce high-resolution images, and even augment limited datasets to create synthetic images.
Drug Discovery
Drug development is a complex and multi-stage process involving scientific research, experimentation, lead identification, optimization, pre-clinical testing, and drug trials. The process involves various scientific disciplines and is subjected to high failure rates, costs, and lengthy timelines. Gen AI plays a significant role in various stages of this process. Gen AI’s large language models can assist in identifying and generating novel molecules and potential drug combinations, identifying biomarkers, and improving clinical trial design. Furthermore, Gen AI can predict challenges related to drug adoption, helping researchers approach drug discovery from an informed viewpoint.
Generative AI in marketing is also breaking through conventional concepts in healthcare. Marketers are using the technology to assess patient sentiment, test new products, and analyze competitor moves, especially during clinical trials and drug development.
What’s next and how can healthcare providers leverage this power?
Understanding how Gen AI and pre-existing AI systems complement each other to produce deeper insights is the foremost requirement. While predicting patient behavior is among the classic AI capabilities, partnering it with Gen AI, which can structure unstructured data, synthesize through it, and generate high-quality content, can be transformative. Generative AI holds innumerable opportunities for the healthcare industry, and planning and improving alongside Gen AI as it opens its many layers hold tremendous potential for healthcare companies.