The U.S. healthcare system is expensive and wasteful, and is one of the least efficient in the world. More than half of doctors are burnt out, and medical errors are the third leading cause of death. And if the healthcare experience doesn’t kill patients, it most definitely frustrates them: Patients in U.S. metropolitan areas reportedly wait an average of 24 days for a doctor’s appointment—up 30% since 2014.
While the healthcare system is failing, health tech innovation is thriving. Disruptors are working hard to increase healthcare efficiency and reinvent healthcare delivery, better empowering patients and enabling doctors. Many of these tech solutions are driven by artificial intelligence, and AI certainly has been heralded for its transformative powers.
Recently, we conducted the 2018 AI in Healthcare study, surveying 400 doctors and 400 patients (and several payers and IDNs) to gather their thoughts on AI’s use in healthcare delivery. Based on our research, we see AI-enabled tech potentially making inroads to help fix our broken healthcare system. The question is whether AI will enable a return to the human-focused care delivery of the past (a traditional, Norman Rockwell-esque healthcare model) or accelerate a move toward one that’s more impersonal and efficiency-minded (an industrial model of medicine).
Healthcare’s AI-Enabled Evolution
The modern healthcare model—one that has been around since the early 1800s and is built on the doctor’s knowledge, experience and gut feeling—can certainly be improved upon. When, for example, did doctors start spending more time documenting care than providing it? The hope is that when AI is used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of operations and administrative tasks, there could be more emphasis on the doctor-patient relationship. The concern is that when AI transcends administrative roles and lands in the realm of diagnosis and treatment decisions, the healthcare experience could become robotic.
That’s a legitimate concern, and one that appears to be quite common among HCPs. As one primary care physician employed by a regional health system in New England told us: “One of the potential negatives of some of these technological innovations is that it makes the delivery of healthcare more impersonal. You lose the human touch, the intuition that a practitioner can get from being in front of a patient, looking at her, assessing her tone of voice, how she presents herself—you know, her emotional state.”
Some health systems are trying to retain elements of traditional medicine despite the emergence of tech solutions. For example, One Medical and Iora Health have differentiated themselves with tech-based, patient-focused primary care models. On the other hand, market pressures continue to drive mergers and acquisitions, and the overall corporatization of healthcare, which is precipitating the move to industrial medicine. AI is accelerating this transition.
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