Did you know that the market forecast for AI in healthcare says that its net worth is set to increase from $4.9 billion in the year 2020 to a whopping $45.2 billion by the year 2026? This means the industry is forecasted to have a 9 fold increase in just a matter of 5 years! In this market, North America alone recorded a share of around 60% when it came to globally generated revenue. With the revealing of these figures, it is needless to say that AI in healthcare will dominate the future of the medical industry, especially in the USA and Canada.
But the real question you should ask yourself is if you are benefitting from any of it. If you are in the medical industry, is the boom of AI in healthcare actually reflecting in your healthcare management and revenue cycle? Are you thinking of shifting to automated methods but getting scared of a huge investment? The truth here is that Artificial Intelligence alone cannot solve your issues. You need to be equipped with the right knowledge and an able team to implement it well. Here are some great tips to help you make the most out of AI in healthcare.
1.Quantify your Goals:
Some blanket statements regarding the use of AI in healthcare can be pretty misleading. Ask yourself these questions:
- What is your goal?
- Is your desired change expected from the patient outcome or the provider outcome?
- Can the issue be quantified? For e.g., when you are dealing with claim denial issues, you can measure the denial rate. But when you are dealing with patient dissatisfaction, you cannot really put a number on it.
If the issues are quantifiable then:
- The engineering team can get the correct algorithm in place.
- The outcomes cannot be measured in real-time or within short time intervals.
- The team can take appropriate measures by tracking these outcomes and their changes.
2.Prioritize your Outcomes as Expected from AI in healthcare:
The healthcare organization might face different issues both on the administrative and the clinical front. It is not healthy to expect that AI will solve all of these issues in one go. Experts suggest taking up the problems one by one. Here is what you can do for a start:
- Make a comprehensive list of issues faced by the teams.
- Mark each issue as administrative or clinical.
- Now you should prioritize the problems.
- Get in touch with a competent IT team who can help you to identify the issues for which artificial intelligence can help.
3.Is AI in healthcare giving you solutions or suggestions?
Artificial intelligence is often used for very basic functions. The credibility of the company offering you any kind of proposal lies in how they are implementing the technology. Here are some issues which bring down the results:
- Some vendors do not offer a robust solution through the implementation of artificial intelligence.
- Instead, their system throws some suggestions at the user, that is, the management staff of the healthcare organization.
- In some cases, the comprehensive breakdown of the suggestion is also absent. This means you will have to guess the pros and cons of the suggestion by yourself.
- Overall, a great load of time is unnecessarily wasted on figuring out the decision. This indicates that the system is after all adding very little value to the management of the organization.
It is advisable to go for such systems which provide you with direct solutions. This way, a significant amount of time of the staff can be saved.
4.Check the Workflow Integration:
More often than not, external software backed by artificial intelligence gets difficult to integrate with the workflow management system already in place in the organization. Here are some quick points to avoid this issue:
- The best way to ensure that you do not face this problem is to talk to the concerned vendor regarding the integration.
- Some leading software vendors offer customizable options. Keeping your needs and organizational system metrics in place, they can customize the software. This will maximize the utility of the system.
- Talk to the vendors about staff training because they are going to be the actual users of the system. They must undergo complete training to understand the system well.
- Upgradation of systems often takes place with changing times. In case of major user changes, the vendors must help the staff in handling the new functions.
5.Clinical Cost Efficiency:
Clinical outcomes are getting a major makeover with the use of artificial intelligence. While the use of AI in healthcare was introduced way back, major problem areas like EHR screening and radiological functions are getting a huge escalation. This can help to maximize the clinical cost efficiency and improve patient outcomes:
- Recent studies show that the patients are very poorly aware of the medicines they take.
- Even if they know the medicines, they are mostly oblivious of the dosage assigned to them.
- This can be a huge problem for the medical staff when dealing with patients.
- Electronic Health Records can be properly updated and accessed using artificial intelligence.
- The cost increases for the hospital organizations since they cannot charge the insurance companies for the medication record pulling.
- On the other hand, incomplete medical records put the health of the patients at risk.
- Artificial intelligence embedded with the EHR caused great benefits both financially and administration-wise, as reported by a recent case study.
- The case study showed that the hospital saved around $6 million from the new system.
- The patients with a high risk of renal issues were also treated in a much well-informed system.
Embracing new technology like artificial intelligence is the need of the hour. But it can only add value to the pre-existing system if they are implemented in the proper way. Hope these tips will help you to make the most out of AI in healthcare. Do you think we missed out on some points? Let us know in the comment section!
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