How Generative AI is Changing the Game in Healthcare

In today’s fast-paced and rapidly changing world, businesses need to leverage advanced technologies to stay competitive and relevant. Generative AI applications, like ChatGPT, are transforming the way we approach complex problems and helping organizations deliver better business outcomes.  

The healthcare industry is no exception. Efforts to improve patient outcomes, enhance quality of care, and accelerate new treatments are at risk as the industry confronts challenges ranging from rising costs to a shortage of qualified professionals.  

Enter Generative AI, which has the potential to change the game. Generative AI is a new type of AI application that is capable of creating content, such as text, application code, synthetic data, images, video, audio, or a combination of media.

Opportunities to leverage Generative AI in healthcare are here, with the potential to drive dramatic improvements in productivity and patient care: 

• Patient Experience: Chatbots can be used as Conversational Patient Assistants to generate personalized interactions based on the patient’s questions. 
• IoMT Devices: Generate new designs for edge-based devices to meet specific technical requirements and improve usability. 
• Patient Outcome: Improve outcomes by generating personalized medical treatments for patients based on their medical history. 
• Healthcare Operations: Reduce administration costs and time by generating and automating the writing of correspondence such as referral letters and explanations and summaries of clinical tests for patients. 
• Practitioner Experience: Improve physician productivity by performing tasks such as reviewing patient records and test results, and generating summaries and treatment recommendations for patients.   
• Research: Accelerate Research and Discovery by generating synthetic data to test the accuracy of new machine learning algorithms without requiring access to patient data records.  

As the magnitude of AI’s potential becomes evident, it is estimated that close to 80% of organizations will have invested in AI by the end of 2023. This aligns with the industry’s growth, as AI remains the most rapidly expanding workload in the data center, whether it’s implemented on-premises, in the public cloud, or through a hybrid cloud approach. This data underscores the significant role that AI is certain to play in shaping the future of businesses and industries worldwide, as they increasingly recognize its transformative potential. 

Recommendations 

While there is extraordinary potential to transform healthcare organizations with the adoption of Generative AI applications like ChatGPT, there are risks that must be considered. Legitimate concerns have been raised regarding the accuracy of AI-generated content. Results from applications like ChatGPT may also be biased, due to the quality of the data used to train the model. Finally, hallucinations may occur, where ChatGPT fabricates a response that is not based on any factual data. These concerns require all AI results to be validated before they are acted upon. 

 To leverage the immediate potential of Generative AI, while mitigating the associated risk, governance is critical. We recommend IT professionals collaborate with their business stakeholders to: 

• Develop a joint AI strategy.  
• Create a set of Responsible AI Guiding Principles that govern the development and use of Generative AI. 
• Assess the viability of adopting any Generative AI application by evaluating it against business criteria that is aligned to the organization’s mission and values, Responsible AI Guiding Principles, and the complexity of the project. 
• Document and communicate policies that govern the use of Generative AI applications for the use cases being assessed.

To learn more about Generative AI and Healthcare, check out:

Healthcare Services Industry Business Reference Architecture

How ChatGPT-4 and GPT-4 Are Changing the World.