The rapid advancement in AI is increasingly visible in multiple fields, sectors, and domains. The field of medical science is one of those where AI offers exciting possibilities for diagnosis, treatment, and patient care apart from other aspects.
The medical fraternity is keen to understand and leverage the benefits of AI. These professionals are working to enable themselves with AI and the AI based tools which are available. They are also identifying potential areas where AI can bring positive impact. Using the AI based solutions and tools is certainly going to provide huge benefits in the healthcare segment and the industry is looking forward to leveraging the potential.
There are some existing AI based offerings which cater to the healthcare professionals.
A voice power care assistant which helps patients connect with the appropriate physicians.
Another one is an AI based solution in the health care industry which is a bot assistant that can answer clinical questions, transcribe dictated case notes and automatically organizes images and files.
Another solution is a voice enabled digital assistant for physicians.
There will be more such tools, and many will be seen in near future.
This article considers how the general physicians can leverage AI.
General physicians are the medical professionals/doctors who provide non-surgical services, diagnosis, and therapy to patients through hospitals, clinics, or private consultations. They are generally the first touch points for any ailment.
The interaction between the patient and the physician, more or less, includes the following aspects:
1. History
2. Physical examination
3. Identification of symptoms
4. Diagnosis
5. Investigation
6. Therapy or Treatment
7. Follow-up
8. Preventive and/or Precautionary measures
The list above includes steps which can be optional, like physical examination, investigation and possibly follow-ups. The rest of them are, more or less, mandatory for a normal line of treatment.
All the above steps are important in the overall process.
In the steps mentioned above about 5-6 steps, excluding physical examination can be enhanced by leveraging AI. An application built on top of a custom model catering to the medical science and fraternity will be useful in assisting with the mundane tasks.
Advantages:
- Automatic data collection in all the steps except the physical examination and follow up.
- Provide an intelligent contextual summarized recommendation which can be referred by the physician.
- Instantly provide the physician with important and salient points and suggestions from a vast knowledge base.
- Recommendations related to diagnosis, suggested investigations and therapy.
- Natural language features to remove the language barrier.
- Save time for the physician which can be utilized for catering more patients. This will be significant in areas where the patients are more, and physicians are not enough in number.
- Capture patient details which can be leveraged for future saving time in subsequent visits by the patients.
- Omni channel support.
Drawbacks:
- There is an additional step to keep adding data to the app at every step to get the recommendations and summary related to diagnosis, Therapy etc.
- Privacy concerns needs to be handled.
- Hallucination is a known issue which needs to be addressed.
Regulatory compliance is an important aspect which needs to be adhered to, considering the benefits and consequences of AI in medical and healthcare industry. Such regulations include, but not limited to, Ethical practices, Data Privacy, storing and sharing patient records etc.
Conclusion:
The general physicians can leverage the AI based features in their work. It can save time. They need to be aware of data privacy and hallucination concerns so that they can use their judgement and skills to decide on leveraging the recommendations by the AI model.
There is a huge area in the field of medical sciences which can leverage AI to improve the offerings, accuracy, accessibility and lot more using multiple AI based services and offerings.
