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.
