One of the ways AI can help humans is to aggregate and amass far more details and data, (IOW information), than a single human can hold in mind at any one time. After AI goes and finds all the relevant data in seconds, it can then search and find the most useful pieces for a specific moment such as diagnosis.
This is similar to what Doctors do, accumulating background information, symptoms, diagnosis, and potential medications or other treatments. The office overhead is formidable just to put the Doctor “in the know” about real time patient treatments.
Then, there’s the added cumbersome and plodding interacting with various health insurance protocols, and billings.
Just smoothing out all this data processing holds promise for more time to interact personally with the patient. To say nothing about aid in diagnosing accurately and rapidly.
The search features will be especially valuable to health-care workers who are already burdened with staffing shortages and daunting amounts of clerical paperwork.
A study funded by the American Medical Association in 2016 found that for every hour a physician spent with a patient, they spent an additional two hours on administrative work. The study said physicians also tend to spend an additional one to two hours doing clerical work outside of working hours, which many in the industry refer to as “pajama time.”
Aashima Gupta, global director of health care strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, said that as a patient, interacting with the health-care system can feel like a very fragmented and challenging experience, so she is excited to see how clinicians can ultimately leverage Google’s new tools to create a fuller picture.
“To me, connecting the dots from the patient perspective has long been health care’s journey, but it’s hard,” Gupta said. “Now, we are at a point where AI is being helpful in these very practical use cases.”