Health care has witnessed remarkable advancements over the past several decades. Significant breakthroughs include the development of major organ transplants, life-saving vaccines, antibiotics, and the mapping of the human genome, leading to genetic diagnostics and therapies, cancer immunotherapy, minimally invasive surgery, robotics, digital 2D and 3D imaging, and advancements in mental and behavioral health. These innovations have helped improve medical diagnostics and treatment, resulting in better outcomes.
However, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to introduce positive changes in health care even more rapidly than the breakthroughs mentioned above. According to a Wolters Kluwer Health survey, 40 percent of U.S. physicians are ready to use generative AI when interacting with patients at the point-of-care.
Although it is impossible to predict with any certainty the precise nature and location of AI’s greatest impact, its potential applications are remarkable. But before we can explore the potential use-cases, it is important to examine the key market dynamics driving the development and adoption of AI in health care in the first place.
Technological Advancements and Integration
AI is not new; the term itself was coined in 1956, almost 7 decades ago. Its realization and growth today are more a factor of technology – computing power, high-speed communications, big data solutions, machine learning algorithms, and miniaturization – than anything else. In health care, technology is driving practice management efficiencies in areas such as practice and payer management, advanced diagnostics from computer vision and advanced image, text and audio recognition, and natural language processing.
Economics
Health care costs continue to skyrocket with more than 17 percent of the US GDP tied to health care in 2022. AI has the potential to help control this due to its rapid processing, increased efficiency, and ability to improve outcomes.
Enhanced Patient (Customer) Experience
We live in a time of increasing consumerism; health care is no exception. Advanced chatbots and consumer health care apps that use image recognition and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to indicate potential health care concerns and then connect patients quickly via telemedicine to health care resources are increasingly important market drivers. Further, the speed at which AI assists in clinical decisions works to satisfy consumers in keeping with our culture’s increasing need for almost instantaneous response. And, almost counterintuitively, AI used well can help enhance the human touch in health care, freeing providers to focus more on their patients leading to a more engaged and exceptional customer experience. When AI, for example, automates the creation of patient records by listening to the interactions between doctors and patients, the doctors are freed to spend more time just listening and interacting with patients.
Shifts in Health Care Practices and Education
Deploying AI effectively means that experts should be trained in how to design, build, deploy, market, and utilize it. Using AI-driven simulators, for example, can enable students and professionals to practice and learn repeatedly before attempting complex procedures.
Personalized Care
One of the most exciting trends is AI’s ability to analyze enormous amounts of information to personalize treatment plans and medications, and help indicate patients at risk for future disease, sometimes in the distant future. An example of this is AI-enabled clinical testing, where the detection and analysis of certain biomarkers is highly correlated with the risk of developing specific diseases in the future, that can often be mitigated by definitive actions taken by the patient and doctor today.
Conclusion
Overall, technological advancements, economics, enhanced customer experience, shifts in health care practices, and personalized care are driving the adoption of AI. Understanding what is driving this development, and how it can help a practice and patients, can positively impact the health care community overall. While there is still a long way to go in the realm of AI in health care, these market insights are continuing to pave the way for AI.
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Bruce Lieberthal
Bruce Lieberthal serves as the Chief Innovation Officer for Henry Schein, Inc. In this role, he is at the nexus of evaluating hundreds of cutting-edge solutions and technologies, advising the medical and dental business units of Henry Schein on important emerging trends, and helping connect the company’s global sales, marketing, and distribution capabilities with important new products that help its customers run better practices and deliver excellent patient care. Previously, from 2009 until 2015, he was the Vice President, Emerging Technologies for Henry Schein, Inc. Bruce had oversight responsibility for Henry Schein Medical Systems (MicroMD) in the US between 2011 and 2017 and led Henry Schein One’s Digital Dental Exchange (DDX) business. He also led the ConnectDental team, focused on the launch of Henry Schein’s digital dentistry business for two years and worked closely with the Corporate Business Development Group advising on technology opportunities. Bruce has been a leader in dental technology for almost 35 years. He graduated the State University of New Yok at Buffalo’s School of Dentistry in 1983, practiced dentistry for 14 years between 1984 and 1997, and brings expansive knowledge and forward-thinking insights to the Henry Schein team.
