In today’s fast-changing business and technology landscape, healthcare teams are relying on innovative tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to accommodate patient needs, enhance quality of care and maximize facility efficiency. But what makes AI such a powerful solution for healthcare—and how can medical organizations deploy this technology efficiently and ethically?
At SafeNet Consulting, we help a variety of businesses solve complex problems through custom technology solutions. We’re proud to partner with game-changers in the field of healthcare, developing data and artificial intelligence tools to ensure their patients and businesses thrive. This time, we’d like to dive into the subject of AI apps for hospitals and healthcare, including their advantages and key use cases.
The Ethics of AI in Healthcare
One of the most useful aspects of AI is that it can learn from massive sets of healthcare data—at a capacity that’s unheard of for humans. This feature allows AI to support a wide range of hospital operations, including supporting clinical decision-making, administrative tasks, and even patient engagement. However, despite its impressive (and largely untapped) potential, AI also brings unique ethical complexities to the healthcare field.
If you’re bringing AI into a healthcare scenario, and making decisions based on personal data, it’s important to define what those decisions are—and what personal data should be allowed to create those models. For example, you can’t have an AI that’s exclusively trained on a single age or ethnicity and then apply it to every patient. That solution won’t be functional, and in fact, could be a major detriment to a clinician’s decision-making process.
When you’re leveraging AI and healthcare data, the model has to accurately reflect the population that you’re serving. This is just one of the many ethical conversations around AI apps for healthcare—and we’re sure to see ethical policies and guidelines evolve alongside this technology as adoption increases.
How Artificial Intelligence Supports Hospitals
Now that we’ve covered the ethicality of AI in healthcare, let’s break into some of their leading use cases in hospital environments:
Census Count Forecasts
Did you know that AI tools can help accurately forecast census counts across hospital departments? These solutions enable hospital staff to proactively plan around patient flow issues—supporting more intelligent resource planning and allocation. Here’s how it works:
AI models can analyze huge sets of data to identify valuable patterns. By integrating AI with a health system’s data and external information, hospital staff can predict patient census count with remarkable accuracy and speed. That census information helps inform decision-making around distributing hospital resources, discharging patients and preventing potential bottlenecks.
Medical Scheduling
Artificial intelligence is very good at analyzing many potential combinations to find the optimal solution. You can actually apply that capability to scheduling, using AI to ensure clinicians are available at the right times to meet the needs of their patients.
Artificial intelligence can quickly create suggested schedules for physicians using data on frequency and types of medical appointments. As the system gathers more scheduling data, it learns and adapts—actively aligning clinician availability with patient demand. Unlike humans, AI can collect patient data, identify trends and propose the best scheduling solution in seconds, supporting facility efficiency, reduced wait times and more reliable patient care.
Patient Support & Engagement
Another useful application of AI apps for healthcare is supporting patients with chatbots. These AI-based applications can be used to give hospital patients fast, personalized answers to common questions, including additional information on their condition and symptoms. Healthcare chatbots can also be used to assist patients with locating hospitals and scheduling appointments.
AI has major potential to help personalize and contextualize care for patients. Indeed, some healthcare organizations are even using AI-based apps to deliver alerts and targeted content to encourage additional action in patients, such as scheduling follow-up appointments or filling prescriptions.
Put AI to Work for Your Enterprise
At SafeNet Consulting, we develop authentic connections with our partners so that we can create the strongest solutions together. Our team has extensive experience with data and artificial intelligence for a variety of healthcare applications. We’re here to help you make sense of your data—and transform it into a strategic asset that supports your business goals.
Whether you’re ready to leverage predictive analytics, machine learning, data intelligence or a completely customized application, SafeNet Consulting is here to help. We’ll collaborate with you to understand your unique challenges and build a tailored solution to meet them.
For more information on our team and complete capabilities, be sure to contact us today. Also, be sure to reach out for more insight on AI apps for healthcare—and how you can deploy these tools to support your patients and objectives.
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