Health + Tech | AI and diagnostic accuracy in healthcare | News

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been changing the way we live our lives in several areas, healthcare being no exception. Although, we have been traditionally slow to adopt new health technology, in recent years, we have been catching up, where using technology to enhance and build healthcare in several areas is concerned.
For years, the country has been fighting an ever-increasing burden of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which seem to be increasing no matter what methods we employ to slow their progress. One of the problems that we face in this regard, is people learning about their conditions, in many cases, when they are far advanced and they are harder to control or reverse. AI can be very useful in this scenario to catch diseases like cancer, diabetes and heart diseases at their very early stage and give the doctors a tool to ensure more accurate diagnosis.
With machine learning, AI is able to produce and analyse large amounts of data faster to make things like cancer detection easier, and more accurate, thereby save lives. We can all appreciate that early detection can make a big difference to whether a person can be successfully treated. AI algorithms that can help doctors review mammograms, X-rays, CT scans and other diagnostics can identify early signs and development of several types of cancer and other ailments. These may otherwise go unnoticed until they are more advanced and treating them becomes more technical and costly.
According to the World Health Organization, Jamaica has a prevalence rate for diabetes in the age group 15 and over of 17.5 per cent. This is almost 20 per cent of our teen to adult population. We must use every means available to us to reduce the number of our people affected by diabetes. AI can be a helpful tool in this effort. It can be used to track things like glucose levels, genetic predisposition and patient behaviour and practices, especially those related to lifestyle, and then use this data to determine risk of developing diabetes, possible mitigation strategies and to improve treatment plans if persons are diabetic or prediabetic. This can reduce the likelihood the development of diabetes and if it is already present, associated complications, like kidney disease, loss of limbs and blindness.
Two other major illnesses among our population are heart disease and high blood pressure. The precision of the AI-produced data can equip doctors to detect early signs of development of heart attacks or strokes, leading to the ability to take quick and early action to prevent these and save patients’ lives.
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While AI is incomparable when it comes to assisting with quick and more accurate diagnoses of specific illnesses, it can also be used as a general tool to improve the efficiency and overall management of the healthcare system. In the last few years, we have actively been working on and taken steps to improve things like waiting times and staff welfare in our public health facilities. There have been improvements, but AI can offer even more in a shorter space of time. For example, AI can be used to automate repetitive tasks and those that are simple enough that they do not have to take up the time of a healthcare professional. Customer service chat bots are a great example of this. If persons need more information or a human to talk to, then the AI can direct them in that way. However, for simple information and educational content, AI can cover areas that patients tend to be most often interested in.
I think we can all accept by now that AI is the future and if we are going to adjust to the ever-increasing demands of patient care and other healthcare requirements, then we must embrace the technology and use it to improve our services. It has always been my belief that Jamaica can lead the way for the Caribbean in this regard, like we’ve done in so many other areas. NCDs, which remain a big challenge for us, can be tackled in a more systematic way using artificial intelligence and machine learning. We have the chance to revolutionise how we diagnose and treat patients, enable doctors to make more data driven decisions, have improved and increased treatment options and ultimately provide better care for our population.
Doug Halsall is the chairman and CEO of Advanced Integrated Systems. Email feedback to [email protected] and [email protected].
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