The World Health Organization estimates that by 2030, the world will face a shortage of around 10 million health professionals if health systems do not make significant changes. This looming crisis threatens to deprive millions of people of accessible, quality care, which could have devastating consequences for individuals and communities around the world. Fortunately, AI tools are providing innovative solutions to this problem in a variety of ways that have the potential to ease the administrative burden on healthcare professionals, expand access to care, and ultimately promote greater equity in health around the world. Health care should not be seen as a privilege for some; it is a right for all, and AI solutions can instill this right across the world.
To help increase access to care for all, we’ve rounded up four of the most important waves currently helping to change access to care for all, complemented by the latest trends in generative artificial intelligence.
Uses of AI in Telehealth and Virtual Care
A estimated 22.2 million people in rural communities across the United States live in areas where there is a shortage of healthcare providers, meaning telehealth is an essential tool for providing lifesaving care across the globe . Millions of citizens saw these benefits realized for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic, when telehealth companies enabled global citizens to access necessary and life-saving care remotely.
With AI-powered agents and co-pilots, remote healthcare has also seen increased efficiency and support with tools like basic medical advice and improved triage workflow for healthcare responders. emergency services that provide medical advice to patients remotely.
AI-powered assistants’ to improve decision accuracy
As with any application of AI in healthcare, the hope is to improve provider decision-making, not replace it. When AI is trained on medical information and has comprehensive security features, it can enable nurses and doctors to benefit from the knowledge of millions of fellow healthcare professionals whose data drove the use of the AI system . AI can thus serve as a “gut control” for healthcare providers, giving each provider the mandate to make decisions faster, improving patient trust and engagement because they have the most informed information. most comprehensive and in-depth available, ensuring that even patients in less developed healthcare systems can benefit from the latest and most advanced research and knowledge.
For some health groups, it could mean the difference between life and death. In high-stress situations, small symptoms may go unnoticed or undetected, particularly by new practitioners who have never been aware of a given complication before. AI has the potential to detect these subtle symptoms, thereby increasing the healthcare professional’s knowledge and providing deeper analysis of potential diagnoses. Meningitis, for example, is often confused with the flu, but AI could help identify key differences in symptom patterns, ensuring a more accurate and faster diagnosis leading to better outcomes.
Resource allocation and administrative support
In areas with limited healthcare infrastructure, AI can help optimize the distribution of resources, such as medicines, medical staff and hospital beds. More than in many other industries, doctors and nurses carry a heavy burden of administrative work, between compiling patients’ medical histories, filing medication dosages and entering symptoms into records. Some studies have shown that doctors can spend up to 34% of their time is spent on administration. When these administrative tasks add up, the result is reduced physician availability and fewer openings for patients in areas where healthcare facilities are scarce.
By implementing AI-assisted co-pilots for quality assurance, note-taking, logging, documentation and coding, doctors can free up more time and energy to focus on patients – this who, like research has shown, can lead to better relationships and deeper conversations, giving doctors a more holistic view of their patients’ health and leading to better diagnoses.
Language and cultural barriers
One of the biggest challenges remains language and cultural barriers which can potentially lead to misinterpretations and errors. In these situations, AI-powered tools can eliminate language and cultural barriers with real-time machine translation capabilities. As a result, this ensures that patients from diverse backgrounds have access to the critical information they need, regardless of who their doctor is or what language they speak. Similarly, AI can reduce unconscious bias in healthcare by training medical algorithms to ensure equitable decision-making, improving access and outcomes for historically marginalized groups, and improving equity in health matters.
Everyone deserves access to the best possible healthcare, but the high cost of traditional solutions can exacerbate disparities across the world. AI provides a powerful solution to this problem, bridging the gap by making technology more affordable and accessible to all healthcare providers. By democratizing access to world-class healthcare, AI has the potential to revolutionize the industry and ensure that its benefits are not limited to a privileged few. As AI continues to advance, its role in promoting healthcare equity will only grow, ultimately leading to a future where quality healthcare is a right, not a privilege.
Expanding access to care is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but health systems should arm themselves with technology capable of offering the best options. AI is a simple, cost-effective method that will relieve overburdened healthcare systems, paving the way for billions of patients around the world to receive high-quality, low-risk care.
About Andreas Cleves
Andreas Cleves East at Corti co-founder and CEO. After spending almost a decade working as a multi-entrepreneur in the AI space, Andreas founded Corti with Lars Maaløe, pioneering a safe and effective generative AI platform for healthcare. Corti’s AI not only takes notes, but also ensures quality, logs, codes, pushes, prompts and documents every patient interaction. With significant research findings in speech processing, dialectical challenges, medical coding and language understanding, Corti’s artificial intelligence improves real-time consultations throughout the patient journey in the United States. United and Europe.