publive-imageArtificial intelligence in healthcare has been an interesting issue for the past couple of years, but the pandemic in 2020 bought new challenges to the healthcare industry and has changed how AI in healthcare is perceived today. It has increased productivity and efficiency of care delivery and has enabled healthcare practitioners and systems to provide the best experiences to the patients in care. Healthcare in AI has been a paramount success story. 

The implementation of AI-powered medical devices, telemedicine, blockchain, remote-patient monitoring, and electronic health record systems enabled organization, swiftness, and cost-effectiveness for the patients and the healthcare providers. Across the healthcare industry, AI is changing the way clinical providers make decisions. It is playing a crucial role in clinical decisions support as it is delivering data to aid in diagnosing, treatment planning, and population health management. The entire industry is investing in AI, with more emphasis on deploying it to reap its benefits than just a moonshotmoon-shot technology of the future.

Here are the 5 key trends of the AI-powered healthcare industry in 2021.

  • On-demand healthcare is growing: With the coronavirus pandemic restricting people to stay indoors, more and more people are availing themselves of on-demand healthcare services. AI has helped since the early days of the pandemic in a variety of ways as researchers, scientists, and doctors all sought information that would help them fight this deadly disease. Using online medical assistance helps individuals to stay indoors, avoid the crowd, and also quarantine themselves when it is needed. 
  • Rise use cases in vaccine development: Within months of the emergence of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, vaccine trials had already begun on a global scale- an incidence that would have surprised us a few years ago. A large part of the vaccine development involves analyzing messy, unformatted, and non-standard clinical trial data in different formats. The rapid developments of AI and ML technologies have largely contributed to finding the accurate components, data, and compositions that led to the speedy implementation of vaccines worldwide.
  • Choosing AI-as-a-service (AIaaS) to deliver swift ROI: As new solutions hit the market, healthcare leaders need AI solutions that work to address some of their most pressing issues. AIaaS is an emerging factor that is enabling rapid success in health tech. This model involves contracting with a partner that builds, delivers, monitors, and supports the automation, which facilitates a health system that effectively scales AI through the entire enterprise. Reports found that healthcare organizations familiar with automation and those already running automation systems are more likely to prefer AIaaS than any other technology.
  • Data unity and MLOps: Whether in clinical applications or the administrative side of healthcare, AI and ML have applications that essentially underpin the need for data. While AI models are already contributing their bit, models that have been developed and deployed in controlled environments show inferences at par with the clinicians. The same model when paired with a different data set, shows subpar results. On the other hand, the clinicians can go outside the hospital bounds and still be effective. For AI models to reach a high degree of maturity, the underlying data needs to be uniform across the different environments.
  • Implementation of Cybernetics: Cybernetics is an exciting and rapidly developing area in artificial intelligence. While people relate cybernetics to technologies as a brain-computer interface, it also has other operational applications that are less futuristic and can work alongside humans to provide useful real-time results. In healthcare, it can augment every human employee's work to reduce errors and improve decision-making. Combined with automation, cybernetics can bring AI to every employee and process throughout the healthcare industry. 

As AI matures, technology practitioners are taking a deeper look at all the things that can go wrong with the implemented tools and applications and are constantly developing and remodeling the systems for increased efficiency. These technologies and apps are encouraging healthier behavior in individuals and are also helping with the proactive management of a healthy lifestyle. It is putting individuals in control of their well-being.