The pandemic has brought a digital change in the world. The unprecedented situations that came up with the different shades of challenges have given birth to some new concepts that surround social distancing leveraging the technology.
Talking about the healthcare industry, it is the most affected niche with the highest need for innovation that can only be brought with the right usage of technology concepts to innovate some smarter solutions for humanity.
Artificial intelligence is an undoubtedly extraordinary technology that can help reshape the healthcare industry with its effective solutions.
How AI technology helps healthcare?
Hospitals tend to generate a huge amount of data. Patients’ healthcare records contain information like their reports, x-rays, CT scans, blood pressure, and sugar counts. AI technology has the power to analyze these huge data to recognize the patterns that can help to perform better diagnose and improve the healthcare system.
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The data analysis and pattern recognition feature of AI can help predict certain diseases in humans to help take necessary precautions at the earlier stages.
Moving to our next technology, that is IoT.
IoT technology has its power in getting devices connected which acts as an advantage for healthcare professionals to ease the diagnosis.
How IoT technology helps healthcare?
With the remote healthcare facilities getting more in trend during the time of social distancing, the need for IoT based healthcare gadgets has surged to an extent. IoT gadgets can help provide more connected care to the patients with its functionality that tracks healthcare parameters to alert the patients about their health and also give live insights to the doctors by making the data easily available to them for the better treatment.
Such data can help doctors create better and personalized healthcare plans for their patients and also help them provide remote healthcare from the matrics stated by the smart devices.
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Well, this was just the introduction to what power this technology can bring to the healthcare world. Now let’s get into the important part to understand how AI and IoT gadgets can create a smart hospital and how the combination of both the technologies has the ability to bring revolution to the healthcare infrastructure.
5 smart ways to leverage AI and IoT to digitize the hospital operations
● Remote healthcare through telemedicine
Having telemedicine apps for the hospitals will reduce staff work of scheduling and keeping track of patients’ data. The AI chatbots of these apps interact with the patients to help them with their queries and symptoms to suggest some medication at the initial level.
The bots are designed to take preliminary information from patients to create healthcare records for doctors to analyze them later. Connecting IoT technology with such apps, remote monitoring of the patient gets to the next level.
That is, while in hospital nurses need to take care of the fluctuation in the patient’s healthcare metrics, but with IoT technology, its sensors keep track of patients’ health and are automatically recorded and logged into the systems for nurses to monitor it from anywhere. Thus freeing up the staff from manual entering of data and maintaining records.
● Improving diagnostic accuracy
The Healthcare industry is diagnosing patients from years, in spite of being highly efficient in their efforts, doctors and hospitals sometimes fail to give accurate data resulting in vague reports claiming negatives to positive thus making severe conditions for the patients.
Identification of potential tumors, especially for some serious diseases like cancer becomes easy and more accurate with AI. AI algorithms have the ability to stitch images together and remove visual noise to create clearer images for doctors to scan it to find the concrete reports. AI also has the intelligence to scan the reports itself and is said to be more effective than any radiologists in identifying the signs of threat.
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● Identification of critical patients
A hospital with thousands of rooms might have patients with different levels of conditions. Monitoring and taking care of each of them becomes harder especially in the times of COVID-19.
Having AI-powered virtual assistance enabled in the hospital infrastructure will help hospitals save many lives. This virtual assistance sends an alert to the doctors about the patient as soon as it figures out danger or on the worsening of the patient’s condition. The systems will immediately provide the details of the vitals given to patients to help the doctor diagnose them quickly.
The smart systems can also diagnose things that are often missed by doctors, thus reducing the death rates in the respective hospitals.
● Keeping control of inventory
Embedding IoT and AI in an inventory management system in hospitals can help save a lot of money from healthcare entities. Hospitals often bring the equipment, tools, and other medical things in bulk, missing on the number of things that are used and the things that are misused or replaced or robbed.
It’s normal for a hospital to lose three or four of such equipment like a therapy pump or any other thing without the notice of the management staff. Using AI and IoT enabled inventory management systems would help hospitals implement the right management systems in place.
With the RFID and GPS system embedded in the equipment hospital management would be able to track where the equipment is in the hospital and also about the number of pieces used and the number of prices left in the inventory to call for a new order.
● Reduce in follow-up visits
No shows are the biggest problems for hospitals where patients schedule the visit but feel better and don’t show up in hospitals to keep the doctor waiting. Apps that keep a track of patients’ health can also be used to analyze if they need a followup visit.
AI-enabled IoT apps help track the patient’s healthcare entities to analyze whether the patient’s health is better and would need to appear for a next checkup or not. This will reduce wait times for both patients and doctors to bring a more efficient system in place.
Also Read: RPA for Business Automation
Summing Up:
AI and IoT are both a robust technology individually, imagine what revolution it could bring with their combined power and execution. From identifying a patient’s symptoms to providing quality remote healthcare, tracking their health to book a followup visit to managing the hospital inventory, AI and IoT has the capability to make the next-gen hospitals where cobots would help treat patients.
About the Author:
Parth Patel is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of SyS Creations. He has earned ultimate expertise in RPA in healthcare. Operating the IT Infrastructure of healthcare SMEs and startups keeps him on his toes and his passion for helping others keeps him motivated.