How medical AI can improve health outcomes

How has the health­care sector’s rela­tion­ship with tech­nol­o­gy evolved?

Health­care is an incred­i­bly busy and demand­ing envi­ron­ment to work in. When people’s lives are on the line, there is lit­tle room for mis­takes – and health­care bud­gets need to be tak­en as far as they can pos­si­bly go. The UK health­care system’s rela­tion­ship with tech­nol­o­gy has a var­ied, some­times check­ered his­to­ry, that have cost bil­lions of tax pounds and not yield­ed the right result or just failed.

But in recent years, new advance­ments in inno­va­tions like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and the inter­net of things have intrin­si­cal­ly linked tech­nol­o­gy with bet­ter health­care out­comes, effi­cien­cies and patient expe­ri­ences. AI, in par­tic­u­lar, has helped open up extreme­ly valu­able oppor­tu­ni­ties for explo­ration and research, while also enabling high­er flex­i­bil­i­ty to pre­vi­ous­ly very cost­ly soft­ware changes. As a result, experts have been able to become even more spe­cialised in their field, more effi­cient and, most impor­tant­ly, more effec­tive in their research and treat­ment than ever before.

In what ways has AI already pro­gressed in health­care set­tings?

We have seen great pro­gres­sion around appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment for vir­tu­al nurs­es, help­ing to bring care to a wider num­ber of patients based on real-time engage­ments. AI has allowed robot­ics to advance at a scale pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­ined, and saved many lives through ear­ly detec­tion of dis­eases and can­cers, which humans are unable to do at scale. It has accel­er­at­ed the dis­cov­ery of new drugs to help com­bat ill­ness­es glob­al­ly. In the back­end of health­care sys­tems, there are also lots of obscure use-cas­es where AI has seen rapid progress, such as IT work­flow automa­tion, fraud detec­tion and med­ical data secu­ri­ty, which remains a chal­lenge amidst the industry’s efforts to pro­tect patients’ records and pri­va­cy.

Hos­pi­tal oper­a­tions can occu­py any­thing between 20% and 80% of a health­care professional’s time, with admin­is­tra­tive tasks dis­tract­ing from patient care. By lever­ag­ing AI to stream­line and elim­i­nate those tasks, you can not only alle­vi­ate cur­rent resource capac­i­ty short­falls but also rein­vest that time into plan­ning bet­ter patient care for the future. The ben­e­fits of AI are huge and wide-rang­ing, but devel­op­ing these kinds of appli­ca­tions in-house is cost­ly and time-inten­sive, which has held health­care providers back from embrac­ing AI’s true pow­er.

How can health­care organ­i­sa­tions embrace AI appli­ca­tions with­out hav­ing to acquire the tools and resources to devel­op them in-house?

Devel­op­ing AI appli­ca­tions no longer has to be cost­ly or time-inten­sive. Health­care pro­fes­sion­als can now build their projects quick­ly and accu­rate­ly at scale, with­out any tech­ni­cal exper­tise. Builder.ai auto­mates the heavy lift­ing ele­ment asso­ci­at­ed with engi­neer­ing through an AI pow­ered assem­bly line. This fus­es Lego-like, reusable build­ing blocks and a ver­i­fied net­work of experts to cus­tomise them, with deep automa­tion that vast­ly reduces human effort. It allows you to build a project in a frac­tion of the time that it would tra­di­tion­al­ly take, and with bet­ter accu­ra­cy. Reduc­ing the time tak­en to build from up to 12 months to as lit­tle as two weeks. Cru­cial­ly, our fail­ure rate is less than 5%, which means the block­ers that you often get with in-house devel­op­ers are now a thing of the past. And because of the great­ly improved effi­cien­cy, we can not only sub­stan­tial­ly reduce the cost of a project, but also offer guar­an­teed pric­ing up-front.

What kind of use cas­es has Builder.ai worked on in the health­care sec­tor?

We’ve brought to life some tru­ly inspir­ing ideas with­in the health­care sec­tor. One exam­ple that springs to mind is in rur­al Ker­ala, India, where peo­ple didn’t have con­ve­nient access to med­ical facil­i­ties when they fell ill. To help solve this prob­lem we part­nered with Qure, a start­up offer­ing qual­i­ty care at afford­able prices. Togeth­er, we built an app that con­nects patients, phar­ma­cies and doc­tors on a sin­gle plat­form. Today, unwell peo­ple in Ker­ala can instant­ly con­nect with their doc­tor for advice and receive per­son­alised treat­ment plans, with doc­tors able to pre­scribe med­ica­tion that gets deliv­ered direct­ly to the patient’s home.

Anoth­er exam­ple is the well­be­ing app and social plat­form Mood­it, who approached us because they want­ed to enable peo­ple to take bet­ter con­trol of their well­be­ing by break­ing down the stig­ma asso­ci­at­ed with men­tal health. The app we pro­duced uses an AI-based algo­rithm to aggre­gate and analyse data in order to pro­vide users with deep­er knowl­edge about how to man­age their own men­tal health. The app uses the data to pre­dict pat­terns that flag men­tal health dif­fi­cul­ties, offer­ing advice and ear­ly inter­ven­tion to help safe­guard users.

How have AI-based apps sup­port­ed the glob­al response to the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic?

Today, almost every gov­ern­ment world­wide has invest­ed in a nation­al health­care app to help ease pres­sure on its health­care sys­tem through unprece­dent­ed demand, and con­nect patients and the gen­er­al pub­lic to impor­tant ser­vices and infor­ma­tion. These apps have enabled health­care sys­tems to remain effi­cient, reduc­ing hos­pi­tal over­crowd­ing and wait­ing times while help­ing every­one to feel safer through such a dif­fi­cult peri­od. They allow gov­ern­ments to con­nect patients with doc­tor prac­tices, pro­vide access to med­ica­tion and treat­ment, and help to iden­ti­fy any poten­tial expo­sure to pre­vent or lim­it Covid-19 rein­fec­tion.

Analy­sis by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford found that for every 1% of the pop­u­la­tion that down­loaded the app, it helped to reduce Covid-19 infec­tion by 2.3%. If you cal­cu­late this in terms of staff hours worked, bed usage, admin and data pro­cess­ing, the over­all cost of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal inter­ven­tion becomes a very expen­sive oper­a­tion to main­tain.
Anoth­er exam­ple of this is how AI was used to mea­sure the spread of the virus and almost instant­ly visu­al­ize its path of trans­mis­sion across a coun­try, a city or even a town. I remem­ber at the start of the pan­dem­ic, design­ing a spread detec­tion frame­work (our sig­nal frame­work) that used a mas­sive amount of cel­lu­lar phone data that exists out there to be able to see how the virus was spread­ing.

What is the future of AI in the health­care sec­tor?

The future of health­care can be bro­ken into six key areas: data shar­ing, inter­op­er­abil­i­ty, equi­table access, empow­ered con­sumers, behav­iour change and sci­en­tif­ic break­through. Soft­ware engi­neer­ing is an inte­gral part of that process and Builder.ai is help­ing pro­duce soft­ware at scale, mas­sive­ly reduc­ing the time from idea to real­i­ty. Our AI pow­ered plat­form can accel­er­ate effi­cien­cies in each of these areas, increase speed and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and reduce costs on a mass scale.

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it Builder.ai

Pro­mot­ed by Builder.ai