Companies Applying AI to Transform Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the largest and most important sectors of the US economy with Americans spending $3.6 trillion on healthcare every year which is about $11,000 per person. It is also one of the largest employers in the US accounting for 11% of all jobs in the country. Even though individuals, insurers as well as state and local governments spend a lot of money to lower the costs of healthcare, the system remains broken with costs spiraling out of control. The Center for Medicaid Services projects that by 2028 the costs will increase to $6.2 trillion in annual spendings or 18,000 per person.  

Artificial intelligence can not only lower the costs of healthcare but increase the overall quality as well. Let’s take a look at some of the companies that are using AI to transform the healthcare system. 

Medical Imaging 

In the old days, doctors would have to examine a medical image such as a CT scan, X-ray, MRI, or anything else to determine whether or not there was anything potentially harmful or life-threatening for the patient. This process takes somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour. AI can produce the same results in 15 seconds. Even though AI systems may be just as accurate as humans, they can perform the same job a lot faster. Imagine how much time would save hospitals and improve patient care. We also have to consider that AI can help fill the shortage of radiologists especially in the UK and the EU. In the UK for example, there are 4.7 radiologists per 100,000. 

A lot of startups have emerged over the past couple of years to improve the quality and accuracy of AI in analyzing medical images. Companies like Zebra Medical Vision, PathAI, and many others are creating products that can improve clinical precision and significantly reduce errors. AI medical imaging technology requires a lot of data annotation work to be done in order to train the machine learning algorithms. Since such work can only be performed by trained medical professionals, this process can be very costly for companies, which is why a lot of them choose to outsource such tasks to a service provider. 

Lowering the Costs of Healthcare

Total joint replacement is one of the most common and expensive surgeries in the US. However, the costs of such procedures can be significantly reduced thanks to AI. Peerwell developed PrehabAI which provides patients with instructions on what to do before the surgery. It takes the patients’ data and creates a personalized daily plan for every person to get them ready for surgery. This includes things like video physical therapy, nutrition counseling, helping patients manage their anxiety, and a lot more. If it wasn’t for this technology, hospital staff would have to create such plans for patients and provide them with counseling. PrehabAI was able to achieve a 25% decrease in the length of hospital stays after the procedure and an 80% increase in going home without the need for home care. 

Managing Patient Intake 

The patient intake process has become even more difficult with the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. It has become dangerous for doctors and medical staff to interact directly with patients which is why a lot of hospitals are using robots to help them manage this process. An interesting new example of this is the new RETHRO robot developed by the University Hospital of Umeå. This robot goes from patient to patient taking their temperature and trying to identify any signs of the virus. Another robot, called Pepper, is used by hospitals to help direct patients to the needed location. There are many other applications of robotics in healthcare that are replacing human workers allowing organizations to save costs and automating a lot of the routine and mundane tasks that take up a lot of time. 

Mindy Support is Helping Researchers Develop AI Healthcare Technology

Medical data annotation can be particularly burdensome due to the cost of hiring qualified individuals to perform the data annotation. Mindy Support is lowering the costs of medical data annotation by sourcing and recruiting doctors in Ukraine to perform the annotations. You can choose to have the data annotation be performed by seasoned professionals since there are more than 10,000 polyclinics in Ukraine or you can have medical students do the annotation for lower-level tasks. Since we are one of the largest BPO providers in Eastern Europe, we can source and recruit candidates quickly and we can scale your project without sacrificing the quality.