In the past few years, innovation in the healthcare space has made drastic progress. The pandemic acted as a catalyst for the industry to embrace the digital-first approach. It laid the cornerstone of telehealth and other innovative care technologies that helped reach the goal of care everywhere on a larger scale.

Transforming Care Delivery with AI

AI continues to bring human judgment and scientific data closer, creating waves of change in the industry. It has become a critical component in diagnosis, treatment, care delivery, and cost. AI makes it easier to find meaning in large pools of patient data at a rapid pace. It is particularly adept at combing through and identifying patterns in unknown factors. Undoubtedly, this has helped in playing a pivotal role in clinical decision support as it delivers data to providers to aid in diagnosing, treatment planning, and population health management. For example, Denmark-based Corti’s AI-powered speech recognition technology analyzes around 250,000 low-acuity consultations every month. It supports patient consultation in real-time to provide best practice recommendations and optimal treatment plans. Another striking use case is of the UK-based startup, Babylon Health. They are a digital-first health service provider that combines an artificial intelligence-powered platform with virtual clinical operations for patients. in pursuit of its mission, Babylon offers a "talk to a doctor" service via its app, GP at Hand that provides 24/7 access to healthcare professionals through video or audio conferencing. It was widely used in the UK during the Covid-19 crisis.

The nature of AI-enabled software is helping expand the diagnostic and treatment options clinicians can provide to patients. It holds the key to transforming health outcomes and creating more personalized care delivery. With an analysis of the patient's electronic health record, AI can highlight potential health concerns for doctors to review. By processing information ahead of time, AI increases the volume of patients that doctors can handle, improves the efficacy of virtual visits, and even minimizes the risk of infection from physical interactions as a result.

Scaling Higher with Tech Enablement

With the unprecedented demand on modern healthcare systems, the industry has demonstrated its resilience and ability to bring innovations to market quickly. The effects of this pandemic on the sector continue to be profound. To meet both the humanitarian challenge and the obligation to their stakeholders, leaders of healthcare organizations need to complete the innovation imperative. They must apply cognitive technology to improve care. Unlocking and aligning health data with appropriate decisions and predictive analytics can support clinical decision-making and actions and prioritize administrative tasks.

There's still a gap to close when making virtual visits as effective as in-person consultations. There is no denying that AI is the holy grail that holds the key to every problem. AI has the ability and capacity to close the gaps in the healthcare industry. 

The Wave of Innovation Continues

Telemedicine continues to be the new normal with virtual doctor consultations. Services like virtual consultations and app-based illness reporting are experiencing a surge in popularity. Under this pressure, technology has evolved rapidly in conversational AI that learns continuously and relies on its taxonomy and cognitive AI search. It has emerged as a new avenue for change. The momentum of evolution is driven by natural language processing (NLP) to create an intelligent user engagement hub. The latest generation of AI-driven chatbots can respond to a vast array of user requests couched in complex vocabulary. They learn from every interaction and preserve the learning for a human service desk agent who helps them predict and accurately identify what users want and then formulate personalized, specific responses. 

Conversational AI works by estimating how potential users will want to interact with the product. Natural language understanding (NLU) is leveraged to decipher the meaning of text-based inputs to derive their intent. However, if the input is speech-based, a combination of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and NLU analyzes the data. They start by considering primary questions that users may have, routing relevant information in order to respond. Natural language generation (NLG) can help formulate the responses, using machine learning algorithms to cumulatively refine responses, ensuring accuracy. These chatbots will enable clinicians to match consumers' existing expectations in an "on-demand" society and drastically improve the patient experience.

A well-crafted architecture offering conversational assistance can reduce the need for human intervention in mild diagnosis, enabling the experts to cater to severe conditions with absolute focus.  

AI chatbots are rapidly starting to gain a strong foothold in the healthcare industry. With an emphasis on conveying timely care to patients, enabling workload for medical professionals, and easing out care delivery, conversational AI enriches the healthcare space's experiences. The technology is raising an army of intelligent bots that will significantly influence and enhance advanced care delivery.

The developments in Conversational AI have led to an effective partnership between digital assistants and health care professionals. A collaboration like this will help promote sustainable healthcare systems that will help in the welfare of all. 

(The writer is the Vice-President—Healthcare & Life Sciences, Cybage)