How Big Data and AI are Driving Change in the Healthcare Segment?

For a while, technology has been transforming the way humans interact and the way businesses conduct themselves. It has largely impacted the healthcare industry, personalizing it to improve diagnostics and providing predictive and enhance care. Accessibility to healthcare is also a result of emerging technologies and their integration with healthcare units.

While it is a fact that robots and machines will never really replace human beings in the healthcare i.e. the doctors, and the nurses and other providers, they will definitely transform a lot of aspects of care in order to ensure swift delivery, convenience to the patients and better outcomes.

Doctors need to stay updated with the latest diseases that are spreading in the atmosphere, need to know of the latest research outcomes, and be updated with the latest cure in the healthcare industry. Imagine walking into a doctor's clinic, and telling them the symptoms that you are probably going through. The doctor can, using the computer or their smart systems, pull out latest data or research into the symptoms you have just talked about. This will help them provide better treatment, and promising faster recovery. When a human looks at your MRI or other scans, it is possible that they miss out on certain aspects. But, a computer will point towards the minutest detail making caregiving easy and immediate. Once your issue is identified, giving care becomes easy and personalized.

When it comes to emerging technologies associated with healthcare, there are three that immediately come to your mind- Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. Combining the three, caregiving has become more personalized and effective.

Big Data is already huge, and is making quite an effort to revolutionize healthcare. On the other hand AI is just an emerging technology, yet it is all set to enter into our lives and improve it in a tremendous fashion. When you talk about AI, you will see that it has blended in the cars, Google searches, and in the many live suggestions such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana,OK Google and Amazon's Echo. They use natural-language processing to help you with basic stuff, and enhancing your interaction.

Now, let's translate this efficiency that has been depicted by AI and Big Data into healthcare.

With these technologies in healthcare, you can organize the patient routes and personalize the treatment plans for a more targeted outcome.

Let's have a quick look at the changes these two technologies will bring when integrated together.

Data Management in Healthcare
Data management is one of the primary applications of Big Data combined with Artificial Intelligence. From collecting the data to storing it, normalizing it and tracing the lineage, data management plays a pivotal role in managing healthcare systems. With this terrific combination, mining through the health records, analyzing them to understand the current state of the patient's health and their history as well as mining through latest research is made easy and convenient. Now, you can provide personalized care through the records and the lineage they hold.

Designing Treatment Plans
For a while, IBM Watson has been collaborating with oncologists to offer best-in-class care decisions to the patients. A three-pronged approach has been devised for the same that helps doctors take a look at some of the best protocols for care to be given to the cancer patients. With CareEdit tools that come with this massive integration of two technologies, a proper guideline has been readied for treatment to be given to the different types of cancers.

CareGuide offers information on clinical decision support system while CareView helps analyse the outcome of the past clinical decisions, to understand what type of treatment the patient received, and how did they benefit from it.

There are apps being developed to deliver mental health treatments in a remote environment. With this app, people can analyze their own moods, and gather coping strategies that work best for them.

This combination works best to design treatment plans for Oncology which has a mix of structured and unstructured data coming in.

Automating Repetitive Tasks
In healthcare you need cognitive assistant that can assist you in clinical decision making. When used in radiology, it can detect problems and spots in the images faster and in a more reliable fashion as against when done manually.

Identifying certain diseases, preventing their scalability in the body etc. are repetitive tasks that can be done using machines. You can feed in some logic to the machines that can help them identify certain diseases.

Such machines are still in their nascent stage, and some of them result in poor diagnostic performance, which is why it has not adopted by a huge user base.

Enhanced Consultations
If you are unable to get an appointment with your doctor, you no longer need to wait till it is available. Turn to the app that has derived using a combination of AI and Big Data which helps in online medical assistance and consultation. Such system combines personal medical history and common medical knowledge to offer consultation on the illness. With such systems, you can tell patients on their issues, the medications they should take, remind them of these medications, and follow up on how they are feeling. Basic treatments can be availed with such systems.

With such amazing benefits associated with Big Data and AI, healthcare is in for a truly reforming time. The remote treatments have improved significantly, and offer health assistance for chronic diseases to those residing in remote environment. Accessibility and convenience have resulted from this combination.