Dr John Payne – Consultant Transplant Cardiologist at the Golden Jubilee National Hospital, Clinical Safety Advisor and Physician Executive – Scotland for InterSystems, discusses whether there is a role for AI in mainstream healthcare and describes what are some of the greatest barriers to its adoption in healthcare.
What role will citizens play in managing their own health & wellness?
As technology advances, citizens will play an increasingly central role in the management of their own health. One way this is already happening is through the growth of “patient portals” – the ability to access your own healthcare record online from wherever you are.
Whereas previously, a patient’s healthcare record was something curated and reviewed exclusively by medical professionals – reserved for “doctors’ eyes only” – what we are seeing now is the opening up of this healthcare process to the patient side. By accessing their record from a phone or laptop, patients are taking it upon themselves to examine their healthcare details and ensure that their information is accurate and up-to-date. Whether this is as simple as identifying incorrect allergy information or updating outdated treatment details, involving citizens in this way creates a far more transparent healthcare process that improves doctor’s decision-making and drives quality in patient care.
I also expect to see citizens assuming far greater responsibility in the monitoring of their own health. The consumer trends that already exist in this area – such as using wearables to track heart rate, blood oxygen levels and body composition – will become deeply wedded with medical practices, allowing citizens to provide medical information from home that can bridge the gaps between hospital visits. Processes like this will allow patients to share valuable healthcare data that simply cannot be obtained through a doctor’s visits, such as monthly average heartrate or sleep patterns. This will prove critical in giving doctors a better overview of their patients, and allow them to take a more informed, data-driven approach to dealing with health issues.
Do you think there is a role for AI in mainstream healthcare?
AI has great potential to compliment and augment existing medical practices, and it has fast become a critical tool in the doctor’s toolkit. As a cardiologist, one area where AI proves immensely valuable is medical imagining. Imaging is exploding in healthcare, and with it has come vast amounts of data that need to be processed. For instance, a single cardiac MRI for a patient can produce up to half a gigabyte of data, which can take up to 30 minutes for a doctor to dissect. AI has massively streamlined this process by processing these images in a matter of seconds. In the near future we might see this same approach applied across different areas of healthcare to automate laborious tasks and free up medical professionals to focus on where they are needed most.
Will AI ever assume a critical decision-making role or simply be used as a complimentary tool?
Whilst AI offers critical time-saving capabilities, there is also clear potential for it to be applied at the highest levels of decision making. Some of the most critical decisions taken by medical staff are data based. Deciding whether to give a patient a transplant, for example, requires the consideration of an enormous number of variables, including heart failure score, kidney status, lung strength and psychological factors. Therefore, the capacity of artificial intelligence to synthesise vast datasets makes it an ideal tool for determining doctors’ next steps at critical junctures of patient care. Embracing AI in this way will also help to remove the subjectivity which so often influences doctors’ decision-making, such as a reluctance to proceed with a transplant following the recent death of another transplant patient.
What are the greatest barriers to AI adoption in healthcare?
At the moment, one of the greatest challenges of implementing AI in healthcare is getting doctors to embrace change. Whilst medical professionals are growing to understand the benefits of data-driven approach, it can be difficult for them to relinquish their medical instincts to external processes. This will change as doctors become accustomed to working alongside digital tools and understand their potential in enhancing the quality and efficiency of their care.
At a time when health services are overstretched and under-resourced, implementing new technologies can be difficult. Learning how to use a new tool requires an initial time investment that can be perceived as a burden for overwhelmed medical professionals, but the long term pay off is tools that not only improve the daily tasks of clinicians but drive long term improved outcomes for patients.