Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence is creating images, videos, and more all from scratch. However, apart from these basic examples, AI has many more applications in the real world, a major one being in the healthcare industry.
The healthcare industry during COVID-19 was a mess. Everything was disorganized, vaccine production and delivery was being delayed. In fact, me and my family had to wait three months just to get vaccinated. Alongside this, healthcare employees were being overworked, not to mention the fact that there were worker shortages across the nation.
This is where AI comes in. According to Thomson Reuters, “The impact that generative artificial intelligence and machine learning tools could have on the healthcare industry - to the benefit of providers, patients, and insurers - may be very substantial”. The usage of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry could speed up healthcare processes. From delivery of medicine, production of medicine, data analysis, you name it!
In fact, artificial intelligence is being used as we speak. Science Open shares how Pfizer, one of the few companies to produce a COVID-19 vaccine when it was a threat, utilizes IBM Watson, a computer system that answers questions posed in natural language, for drug discovery. Science Open also mentions that Roche subsidiary Genentech is also utilizing artificial intelligence to aid in its search for cancer treatments. These applications are useful, as AI in these two examples are being used as an aid. It is being used to speed up discovery. If another pandemic were to happen (fingers crossed), artificial intelligence can speed up vaccine detection! Think of the potential lives saved from the aid of artificial intelligence!
There are more examples of AI being applied in the medical industry. One major component of medicine discovery is data analysis. To get employees and doctors to manually analyze millions of 1’s and 0’s compiled into large amounts of data is tedious to say the least. AI can aid with this however, and summarize data for companies. This way, AI saves precious time which could be spent on other important tasks. Listing the possible applications of artificial intelligence in this article would be a massive waste of time. The possibilities are nearly endless with artificial intelligence.
Don’t get me wrong, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the medical industry, but there are some pretty significant ethical considerations that must go into applying the use of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry especially. The largest one is bias. When training artificial intelligence, someone supplies the model with data. This data can be biased, and as a result, the system will be biased as well. This can have serious consequences. Mis-diagnosing a patient can lead to serious health problems. This issue is the reason why 52% of Americans are more concerned than excited about the use of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry, as of 2023, according to the Pew Research Center.
There are other problems such as data breaches, and more. These were the most significant ones, how Americans don’t agree with the application of AI, alongside mis-diagnosing capabilities due to data bias. All in all, artificial intelligence is a game-changing technology, especially in the demanding field of medicine. The proper ethical application of artificial intelligence will make medicinal delivery that much more efficient.