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KAMPALA, UGANDA | THE INDEPENDENT | Experts say technology and Artificial Intelligence are fundamentally transforming the medical industry, creating unprecedented opportunities for improving patient care, diagnosis accuracy, and treatment outcomes.
According to Leilah Kamulegeya, the Head of Communications and Marketing at AAR Medical Insurance, technology continues to evolve, and healthcare providers worldwide are witnessing a revolutionary shift in how they deliver medical services.
Speaking during an interview recently, she noted that this trend has also prompted medical insurers to play catchup as the day-to-day needs of their customers continue to grow. A simple but vivid example is the need for insurers to have fully functional Mobile Applications.
“These allow customers to access services remotely. This App enables customers to locate their nearest provider. It also helps them to track the usage of their cover which is convenient and stress-free,” Kamulegeya noted.
However, when it comes to medical practice, Technology and especially Artificial Intelligence go even deeper. Some of how AI is actively shaping healthcare include the following.
A new AI software is “twice as accurate” as professionals at examining the brain scans of stroke patients. It can even identify the timescale within which a stroke happened, which is crucial information for professionals. This helps medics to come up with more accurate & effective interventions for patients.
AI can spot more bone fractures than humans can. Surprisingly, urgent care doctors miss broken bones in up to 10% of cases. What’s more, X-ray technicians are both in short supply and overloaded. So, using AI to do the initial scan could potentially avoid both unnecessary X-rays and missed fractures which could potentially reduce the need for follow-up appointments. In doing so, this could greatly save patients some exorbitant diagnostic costs.
AI can correctly predict the patients that need to be transferred to the hospital.
This is made possible by training the AI model on factors such as a patient’s mobility, pulse and blood oxygen levels, and chest pain, responding without bias.
This can potentially eliminate false alarms and relieve healthcare providers whilst saving the average person from unnecessarily spending an arm and a leg.
Relatedly, a new AI machine-learning model can detect the presence of certain diseases before the patient is even aware of any symptoms. Using medical data from 500,000 people who are part of a UK health data repository, the machine could predict with high confidence a disease diagnosis many years later.
This development is undoubtedly a game-changer in preventative care.
Particularly, deadly diseases like hard-to-detect cancers could be diagnosed way earlier making the possibility of life-saving interventions even higher.
As the world evolves and embraces Advanced Technology and Artificial Intelligence, it is a great time to be alive. More advanced care is set to improve quality of life and maybe, experts could potentially get around increasing people’s life spans.
