Some of the most fascinating innovations through AI are happening in healthcare.
In Australia, the University of South Australia launched one of the world’s first AI-powered pop-up skin cancer clinics to help pick up suspicious skin lesions.
For people living with disability, it’s unlocking ways to communicate and connect.
Around the world it’s being used to advance research, diagnostics and speed up pathology analysis.
This is opening us up to new breakthroughs in the treatment of all sorts of areas from Alzheimer’s, cancer and heart disease to mental health disorders.
Lucy d’Arville heads Bain & Co’s Healthcare and Life Sciences practice in Australia.
She says AI is also transforming how healthcare professionals and clinicians work, reducing the burden of administrative tasks and allowing them to focus on the provision of care.
“One of the most exciting areas is in the technology called ambient listening – and that’s essentially where you have an app that is AI-driven, which is able to follow the conversation that’s happening between a clinician and the patient and then at the end of the conversation, is able to accurately summarise what was heard,” she says.
With the challenge of providing better healthcare in less time with rising costs, d’Arville says this is revolutionising how the sector operates.
“That’s exciting – just the ability to remove the manual paperwork that hospital staff and clinicians are burdened with, and then health insurers are also burdened with,” she says.
“In the US and also in some of the hospital groups in Australia and New Zealand, this technology is starting to be adopted.”
These types of developments are just the beginning, with AI showing great potential in connecting the dots of an individual’s health journey over time.
“One of the biggest issues in Australia’s healthcare system is that people have to navigate through public and private health systems, but they also have to navigate from their primary care provider to a specialist to a hospital, constantly repeating the same information,” she says.
“AI could really provide the opportunity to interconnect these healthcare systems, laying the foundations for future technology advancement. It’s going beyond what it does for an individual organisation and really thinking about what it could do at a system level that I think is incredibly exciting.”
Integrating intelligent healthcare
Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks is one of a handful of innovators using AI to connect the dots for women’s health.
The Australian startup Ovum recently secured $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to tackle a $1 trillion global gender health gap.
Dr Heffernan-Marks says the app is like a “personal health ally” that women can keep in their pockets whenever they need.
“It’s an app on her phone,” she says.
“She can integrate medical reports, biometric data, cycle tracking, pregnancy tracking, medications, appointments, general symptom tracking, and what Ovum does is actually creates this longitudinal memory of her health and provides more personalised health and wellness advice that she can access anywhere, anytime.”
Users can then use this to advocate for their healthcare and even opt-in to share their data for research into women’s health.
Dr Heffernan-Marks says it will give women one place to log all their health data and enquiries whether that be new symptoms to things like menopause, uploading test or screening results, sexual health history or photos of medications.
“She can take photos of those and it will read it and upload it, and she can have that stored there,” she says.
The idea for Ovum came about while Dr Heffernan-Marks was training as a medical doctor.
Her experience across metro, regional and remote hospitals spotlighted the disempowering experiences for women of all socio-economic backgrounds in trying to access care.
“That was when the idea was born,” she says.
“[It] has now become an AI holistic health partner for women that allows them to integrate all of their health data in one place, to be empowered in their appointments, to advocate for themselves.
“So we’re achieving shared decision making, and therefore, more engagement in preventative health behaviours and improved health outcomes.
“But at the same time, then collecting that data and creating the largest women’s health longitudinal data set that we can feed back into addressing the bias in research.
“Our mission is to transform every woman’s experience of healthcare and to close the gender health gap which is costing our global economy $1 trillion annually.”
Can you trust AI-powered healthcare?
As new AI-driven healthcare solutions enter the market, d’Arville says there’s a mix of “excitement and caution”.
In some ways, she says, it’s like the advent of online banking.
“When banks moved to online banking, there was an open question of whether we trust this system to transfer money and check our accounts and not go into a bank and make deposits?
“I would say that the excitement is coming from how it can impact our lives.”
d’Arville says Bain & Co’s annual healthcare report for the APAC region has found that sentiment towards AI is becoming increasingly optimistic with the latest report finding more than 50 per cent of customers now feel comfortable with AI-only care delivery or an AI-augmented provider for routine preventative or minor healthcare conditions.
“I think the next time we run this research, we will see an even bigger increase in that,” she says.
“Where the caution comes in is for all the reasons that you would expect: accuracy and safety.
“It’s just worrying about whether AI could make a mistake in the diagnosis or treatment. Even though we know that can happen with a human too, I think it feels more acceptable if it’s a human as opposed to relying on a machine.
“The loss of human touch, data and privacy are all concerns.
“But over time as people see the benefits, they will become increasingly comfortable with it.
“And as I said with online banking, it went from a really scary concept to an everyday idea for most Australians.”
Dr Heffernan-Marks has seen first-hand the excitement for smarter, integrated healthcare made possible by AI.
But she says this comes with great responsibility.
“We already have hundreds of women signed up waiting for the app – which is exciting with no paid advertisement, purely organic,” she says.
“My PhD is in AI and women’s health [but] I can tell you that most healthtech or femtech apps haven’t started doing research until a decade on the market, which as a doctor, I’m not going to say a tool does something unless I’m doing proper ethical research.
”So I think we need to be careful around that.
“I’m all about solutions for the healthcare system because I think we need more, but I think we need to be careful about who’s making those solutions and what experience they have.”