Will AI 'Rehumanize' Healthcare

4 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 10 for the problem at hand,” said Baird, who has also had leadership roles on AI-related projects with the World Health Organization, the International Organization for Standardization, and the International Electrotechnical Commission. So, what’s the solution to this problem? It may take more technology, not less, to finally overcome this tech-driven drought in patient bedside interactions. “I actually think that artificial intelligence and machine learning are going to help us re-humanize healthcare,” Baird’s fellows cochair, Jesse Ehrenfeld, said when the AI Committee was first launched. An anesthesiologist, senior associate dean at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and President- elect for the American Medical Association, Ehrenfeld understands the importance of interacting with his patients. “AI is making it so caregivers have more time to interact with patients – to give care,” he explained. “To me, that’s the payoff of this technology.” AI, the Partner According to Erin Sparnon, senior engineering manager for device evaluation at ECRI and member of the AAMI Standards Board, there are two primary reasons why facilities are currently buying clinical healthcare AI. “Case number one is to free up humans from doing routine tasks that don’t need a human. So, we pick on the imaging field: putting your radiology images up, turning them to the left, making sure that they’re just the right size— that sort of task,” she explained. “Use case number two is pulling findings and alerts and notifications out of huge pools of data that it wouldn’t be practical for a human to try to do.” This frees up hospital staff time and other resources to be spent where they matter most, with the patients. However, that’s not the only application of AI that is slowly introducing itself into the healthcare environment. The global medical device market has also seen an influx WI LL A I ‘ REHUMANI ZE ’ HEALTHCARE?