Transforming the future of healthcare in 2022 with AI and its applications

— Dr Vibhuti Agrawal, Associate Vice President, Analytics, Innovaccer
We already know that one of AI’s prime benefits in healthcare is to provide care to an individual and help them stay healthy, along with providing the ability for healthcare professionals to understand the day-to-day patterns and needs better and support a healthy life. While the future of healthcare looks bright, the potential for AI making an even more significant impact on healthcare as we move into 2022 is endless.
Many of the world’s leading health-tech companies are working on a host of different AI-powered initiatives to cumulatively improve patient care, diagnosis accuracy, and even treatment methods. The healthcare sector uses this data to determine a course of action and devise personalized care plans in the development of drugs. Additionally, there has been development of health tracking wellness apps and devices that have helped people stay healthier and meet wellness goals.
A look into 2022 and beyond
India has become one of the leading destinations for high-end diagnostic services with tremendous capital investment for advanced diagnostic facilities, catering to a larger population. A few trends that we can expect to see include the rise in telemedicine, healthcare data with AI, and preventive medicine among others.
In a recent survey, 75% of Indian respondents asked for an immediate shift to remote or virtual care as a top priority. Telemedicine has the potential to save lives by dramatically expanding access to medical treatment, especially in the Indian context, since there are two prime factors here—one, the lack of doctors, and two, the lack of established care in remote areas. And telemedicine helps us tackle both.
Working towards these goals, the government recently announced that a national tele-mental health program would be rolled out to provide better access to quality mental health counseling and care services. While this is a start, we can expect a more robust establishment for telemedicine services in India.
AI systems heavily depend upon the availability of large amounts of data. In contrast, datasets for healthcare in India are fragmented, dispersed, and incomplete. With the help of AI, data could be centralized. Plans for an Integrated Health Information Program (IHIP) to create EHRs for all citizens and enable the interoperability of existing EHRs are currently in development (National Health Portal of India, 2017).
The government is also attempting to create a digital health infrastructure enabling AI solutions. A recent discussion paper by NITI Aayog outlined ambitions for creating a ‘National Health Stack (NHS)’ to make personal health records and service provider records available on cloud-based services to private healthcare actors. The NHS is expected to consist of four key elements — electronic health registries of health service providers and beneficiaries, a coverage and claims platform, a federated personal health records framework, and a national health analytics platform (NITI Aayog, 2018b).
As a matter of fact, rather than reacting to illness, AI aims to predict where and when a condition can occur and provide preventions, treatments, and solutions beforehand. This includes predicting where outbreaks of contagious diseases can happen, hospital readmission rates, and lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, and environment likely leading to health issues in different populations or geographical areas.
AI has opened up the innovation doors to create tools that can spot patterns across large datasets far more effectively than any traditional analytics process, leading to more accurate predictions and better patient outcomes.
While we saw multiple developments in the direction of healthcare digitalization in 2021, there is a lot more that we can expect in 2022, and initiatives from both public and private sectors will be the focal point of future of healthcare in India. One of the best examples — the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission that was launched in India in 2021. To create a seamless online platform that will enable interoperability within the digital health ecosystem, this mission will help connect the digital health solutions of hospitals across the country with each other.
For any healthcare sector, smarter, efficient, and accurate diagnostics should be the heart of it in the present times, especially in India. From further improvement in decision-making, information processing, precision, efficacy, and diagnosis to speeding up the process targeting each segment, AI will enable healthcare stakeholders to revolutionize their care management and delivery. Furthermore, the provision of an early therapy and better treatment with the right approach, will create a win-win situation for all.