How machine intelligence is helping healthcare providers fight the pandemic.
In times of crisis, help can come from the most unexpected places.
We’re seeing that right now in the innovative ways AI is being used to protect healthcare workers and aid the effort to overcome COVID-19. And we’re just scratching the surface on the potential for AI to make the entire healthcare journey safer and more humane for nurses, doctors, and patients.
At Tampa General Hospital in Florida, an AI-driven technology screens individuals for COVID-19 symptoms before they interact with hospital staff and patients. At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, physician researchers are exploring the use of AI-powered robots to obtain vital signs and deliver medicine in COVID-19 surge clinics, allowing healthcare staff to avoid potentially dangerous human contact.
This growing human-AI partnership may be the most significant technology trend being accelerated by COVID-19. It’s likely to become a permanent part of our post-pandemic world. In fact, the rapid deployment and scale of these AI tools offers lessons to organizations everywhere—and a glimpse into the future of AI in the workplace.
True human-AI partnerships
True partnership between humans and their AI assistants have grown out of the pandemic response.
At Seattle’s Providence St. Joseph Health, an AI-powered chatbot delivers care on an unprecedented scale in an admittedly unprecedented time. In its first week of deployment alone, the chatbot screened and triaged more than 40,000 patients, categorizing them by level of care needed and freeing doctors and nurses to focus on at-risk individuals.
With resources scarce, this type of efficiency is literally lifesaving and shows the ability of AI to augment—not replace—human workers.
In my conversations with executives around the globe, I’m hearing less about bots replacing people. Instead, the focus is on using AI to enhance agility and eliminate important yet relatively rudimentary and time-consuming tasks. That’s exactly what we are seeing in the healthcare setting today. It’s an example all organizations should seek to emulate moving forward.
A shift toward natural language understanding
The chatbots deployed by Providence St. Joseph and other healthcare organizations also serve as highly efficient knowledge dissemination platforms. In a crisis, quick access to information is critical. The ability of chatbots to serve as highly informed virtual assistants will only improve as AI becomes more sophisticated.
Organizations in all industries are integrating chatbots as part of a larger digital transformation strategy. And as natural language understanding continues to improve, bot-to-bot communication will become effective enough that humans can simply and easily access information on the topic of their choice.
For example, doctors could pull up a patient’s care records while an AI assistant find and communicate data on outcomes for similar patient profiles. This is an obvious technological evolution and one we may see soon within a hospital setting.
Trust dividend
Increasingly, AI tools are making recommendations, not just communicating information. China’s Zhongnan Hospital, for example, already uses AI to interpret CT scans and identify COVID-19 symptoms when human radiologists are unavailable.
While this ability to identify trends and disease markers isn’t necessarily new, the growing trust in AI signifies a shift—albeit one created by necessity—in our attitudes toward artificial intelligence.
As our comfort with this new “intelligence” grows and as AI advances further, it will move beyond the identification of trends or markers to the prescription of specific actions. In healthcare, that may mean an AI program that first identifies COVID-19, and, after sorting through millions of patient data points, recommends a personalized care plan in response.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. As our pool of data increases exponentially and our processing power grows simultaneously, AI’s abilities will only increase and accelerate. It’s even likely that AI will play a significant role in ending the COVID-19 pandemic itself.
Periods of upheaval create lasting change. The present COVID-19 crisis is no different, and I believe some good will come of this challenging situation—from healthcare that works for everyone to creating more resilient enterprises. The innovative use of AI to augment our healthcare heroes is just one example, one that should inform our post-pandemic world.
