How can doctors take advantage of AI?

Important points

Doctors can use artificial intelligence (AI) in their practices to help diagnose patients, customize treatment plans, and more.

• Using predictive analytics, AI can estimate the likelihood that a patient will develop certain conditions, allowing doctors to improve preventive care and manage high-risk lifestyle factors.

• AI streamlines the administrative aspects of healthcare, simplifying scheduling, billing, and patient record management.

• AI can be used to improve decision-making, enhance doctor-patient communication, and reduce environmental and racial bias.

Learn more about how doctors are using AI to diagnose patients, enhance decision-making, streamline administrative tasks, and more. If you’re ready to start building skills for a career in health care, consider enrolling in Stanford University’s AI in Health Care Specialization. In just four weeks, you’ll have the opportunity to learn how AI can impact patient care safety, quality, and research, and how to apply AI components to your work.

AI in Healthcare: How can doctors take advantage of AI?

AI is everywhere, so it’s no wonder it’s entering the medical field. Physicians are beginning to leverage AI to assist with a variety of tasks, including:

• Improving the patient diagnostic process

• Strengthening drug discovery and development

• Simplify and improve doctor-patient communication

• Abstracts of published medical papers and research

• Posting documents and memos

• Treat patients remotely

Certain AI algorithms are almost as good at certain things as human doctors. ChatGPT’s latest model can now also pass the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). However, while some experts argue that AI could replace doctors in certain tasks, particularly diagnostic and administrative tasks, collaboration between humans and AI is more likely than AI completely replacing doctors. So how can doctors leverage AI to improve care?

AI in diagnosis

AI can be used for diagnosis. Diagnosing a patient is a complex process that requires gathering medical history, nature of complaints, demographic information, and comparing that information to knowledge of the disease. After making a preliminary diagnosis, it is often necessary to make a differential diagnosis, since some diseases are similar in the manifestation of symptoms, but the treatment is very different.

AI algorithms such as chatbots, which typically provide accurate and surprisingly human-like answers to prompts, are now highly advanced, reliable, and valuable reference tools. These tools allow you to quickly provide your patients with the most accurate diagnosis.

AI can be used to simplify and improve the diagnostic process. A Stanford University study found that using AI, doctors were able to accurately diagnose skin cancer in patients about 5% more often than they could previously do without assistance. [1].

read more: AI in Healthcare: Applications, Benefits, Examples

personalized medicine

AI can be used to create treatment plans for patients. AI algorithms can analyze patient data, including medical history, lifestyle, and genetic information, and compare it to treatment responses of similar patients to create a personalized treatment plan for the patient.

With AI, you can provide all-day care to your patients, every day of the year. AI algorithms accompany patients when they cannot, answering their questions, addressing their concerns, and adjusting treatment plans based on emerging symptoms and circumstances.

AI can be used for patient education. Because medicine is a highly specialized and complex discipline, patients do not always have a meaningful understanding of medicine. So, with the help of AI, we can write letters to patients explaining the nature of their condition, how we diagnosed it, why we feel they need a certain treatment, how to take their medication, and more.

Predictive analytics in patient care

Improve patient care with predictive analytics. AI has proven to be very good at predicting the likelihood that a patient will develop certain medical conditions based on their medical history, demographics, and lifestyle factors. For example, diabetes in patients with a family history of diabetes or congestive heart failure in patients with coronary artery disease. By accurately predicting whether a patient will develop the condition, AI allows us to work with patients to change the trajectory of their disease by preparing them for the possibility of developing the condition, managing lifestyle factors, and ensuring adherence to preventive treatment plans.

Using earlier and more accurate AI diagnosis can lead to positive patient outcomes, including:

• Improving treatment adherence

• Improved risk factor analysis

• Enhanced prognostic analysis

• Faster screening

By ensuring that patients receive an accurate diagnosis and adhere to the prescribed treatment plan during their first visit to a medical facility, patients are more likely to recover faster, experience less progression of chronic disease symptoms, and avoid readmissions.

Administrative efficiency

You can leverage AI to improve management efficiency. You can incorporate AI into your daily routine to streamline non-medical administrative tasks such as scheduling, billing, and patient record management. In addition, AI-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology is available. This transcription algorithm converts verbal notes recorded after a patient visit into text that the patient record management system stores in the patient’s file. This technology reduces the time you spend completing administrative tasks, allowing you to focus more on optimizing patient outcomes.

AI can be used to reduce burnout. The American Medical Association (AMA) reported that 41.9% of physicians regularly experience at least one symptom of burnout. [2]. Using AI to automate administrative tasks reduces the likelihood of burnout, improves mental and physical health, and increases productivity and long-term success.

Enhanced decision making

AI can be used to aid decision-making and avoid critical errors such as:

• Displaying racial bias, including intentionally or unintentionally treating patients of different races differently

AI can take the guesswork out of decision-making by accurately recommending tests and addressing patient questions. AI can also be used to automatically administer anesthesia to patients before certain medical procedures.

AI in drug discovery and development

Currently, the drug development process takes 10 to 15 years from conception to market availability and costs an average of $2.6 billion. [3].

This number is likely to continue to rise. Clinical research, which has long been the standard in the drug development process, is taking longer than ever due to:

• complex protocol

• Globalized drug trials

• complex drugs

• Supply chain challenges

Using AI in drug discovery and development can speed up the process and reduce costs. By exploring vast datasets with the help of AI, we can identify the best drug candidates for clinical trials and predict their efficacy, reducing trial selection time and associated costs.

AI can be used to analyze large datasets and compare multiple datasets to each other to help design new drugs or develop beneficial drug combinations.

AI can help get medicines to patients faster. A long drug development process places a burden on underserved patients, so AI can be used to speed up the process of drug development, approval, and marketing. By leveraging AI, it is possible to move drugs to first-in-human (FIH) clinical trials 40% faster than using traditional methods. [4].

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