A combination of artificial intelligence and advanced wearable health trackers will take over the role of diagnosing and prognosing health conditions, revolutionizing healthcare delivery not only in India but worldwide, said Dr Paul Salins, Vice Chairman of SKAN Research Trust.
Delivering the keynote address at the Happiest Health Future of Medicine summit in Bengaluru on 9 March, Dr Salins who is also the Medical Director and Senior Vice President at the Narayana Hrudayalaya Mazumdar Shaw Medical Centre, detailed ideas on how artificial intelligence is shaping up to replace dependence on human expertise in diagnosing illnesses.
He admitted that this would replace some of the work physicians do today, highlighting concerns that the medical community may have with these technologies. However, he emphasised that the shift would ultimately empower doctors.
“The primary care physician who has maximum access to the patient will become the most empowered. Why? Because they will have the ability to utilise artificial intelligence, informatics and data analytics to really provide a level of care that is impossible to provide today,” he said.
He added that the current practise of diagnosing conditions after an individual has developed symptoms, would be replaced by the use of advanced health trackers that can detect even subtle changes in the body’s functioning. The use of AI will allow for earlier warning of health conditions, and personalised recommendations.
“Wearable devices will become increasingly complex. Today, we are blind to the harm we are doing to our own bodies, because it’s a long-drawn-out process and we don’t notice. But tomorrow, these wearables will tell us immediately what the impact on our body is, allowing us to choose,” added Dr Salins.
He noted that the changing landscape of healthcare would require doctors to become more adept at utilising and implementing technologies, effectively requiring them to become engineers in addition to being doctors. Apart from this, advanced technologies will allow them to become more compassionate.
“The greatest gift of artificial intelligence and technology would be to give the doctors the time to provide care and compassion to individuals they treat, something that they are currently unable to do because they are extremely stressed,” said Dr Salins.
Structural change of healthcare
These inbound technologies into medicine would trigger a paradigm shift in the way the healthcare industry functions now. Not only will the role of doctors change, but that also of hospitals, insurance providers and governments.
Dr Salins acknowledged that there were concerns over technology giants potentially taking advantage of these shifts to gain control of a user’s health data. However, he said that society needs to take steps to ensure that the health data of individuals is owned by them and not exploited by others.
“There is always capacity of evil, but we as a society need to ensure that it does not happen,” added Dr Salins.
