By Dr. Adam Seiver

The healthcare industry has made great progress with immersing itself into the digital age, and it’s often easy for health professionals to get excited by all the possibilities of digital technology and its generated data.

While the digitalization is without a doubt a positive change, it brings its own set of challenges. Rapid digitalization of patient data from medical devices into EHRs has given clinicians an influx of data, often making it difficult for them to derive actionable insights. Providers are drowning in data while still starving for understanding.

Medical device developers have responded to the challenge of extracting actionable insights by applying advanced computing technology. Developers have automated the acquisition, storage and display of the data, and offered algorithms that analyze the data and provide meaningful alarms and messages – but we need to go one step further. On the horizon, we can envision technology that will help clinicians integrate clinical data with medical knowledge, enabling clinicians to make higher quality diagnoses and recommendations for patient care. Many point to artificial intelligence (AI) as the umbrella term for this technology.

Rephrasing the term “AI”
There is a lot of talk around AI in the healthcare industry and its potential in the sector. While we know AI will make healthcare more predictive, precise and accessible, it also comes with a loaded question: in a world of artificial intelligence, what role will physicians play? To answer this question, we need to reframe the conversation to envision a world of “intelligence augmentation” (IA) instead of AI. The idea of IA is that technology does not replace clinicians, but instead amplifies their abilities with a set of tools to help them perform more efficiently and effectively in their roles, while also replacing some of the more routine or mundane tasks.

For this system to work, it will require a certain degree of synergy between healthcare professionals and these advanced connected care technologies to leave enough room for each to focus on the tasks most suited to their capabilities. Off-loading the most repetitive and routine activities (ones that involve searching, sorting, filtering and calculating) onto computers will improve clinician workflow and augment the workforce by giving physicians more time for communicating, teaching, coaching and similar activities that require a broader knowledge and understanding of the human condition. With that, allowing clinicians to have more time with the patient shines a light on how technology is actually making healthcare more humane in more ways than we originally imagined.


Leveraging IA to improve healthcare decision support
As the industry shifts toward value-based care, clinicians feel the pressure to deliver efficient and effective care. Yet, given the amount of patients, data and sounding alarms, they are often finding themselves in a reactive state rather than practicing preventative care. There are 440,000 preventable adverse events that contribute to patient deaths in U.S. hospitals every year. Most patients are not identified until 15 minutes before they suffer cardiac arrest that often leads to an adverse event or admittance to the ICU. In general care units, it is often difficult for clinicians to determine which patients are at the greatest risk of having an unexpected serious adverse event such as cardiac arrest or even death. When a patient is deteriorating, clinicians face a large number of choices and don’t always have the right insights to make the best decisions. These choices range from the routine, such as adjusting the settings on a life-support device or choosing the appropriate antibiotic, to the strategic, such as choosing among surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy for breast cancer, prostate cancer or other oncology treatments.

By interpreting data from multiple patient monitors in real time, IA can simplify the data to make it actionable to the clinicians at the point of care, allowing them to identify patient deterioration quicker and intervene earlier with confident care. These insights empower clinicians to make proactive care decisions. By aiding clinicians with the most crucial data points at the time most needed, they have the opportunity to reduce unfavorable patient outcomes and improve patient care. With these actionable insights delivered continuously, clinicians can spend less time on comprehending the data from monitoring solutions and more face time with their patients, allowing caregivers to help patients achieve clarity in both heart and mind during those crucial periods where a serious medical decision needs to be made.

The limitless potential for IA
As we see more and more implementations of IA in the industry, we are optimistic about the potential positive impacts on the healthcare ecosystem. It is critical we understand the problems providers are facing every day and address these problems with technology. IA can address these problems and unlock the collective intelligence and insights across departments within the hospital to deliver the right information at the right time to clinicians. Through the integration of IA and connected care technology, clinicians are not only able to make the shift from reactive care to preventive care, but also have the opportunity to significantly impact a patient’s quality of life.

About the author: Dr. Adam Seiver is the chief medical officer at Philips Monitoring Analytics & Therapeutic Care