Why AI will usher in the next healthcare revolution

Robots have been used to treat and care for patients in our hospitals and clinics for years. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the technical revolution in healthcare even further. Although there is a long history of the use of machine learning (ML) and AI in health, these tools have become more accessible and practical for use in day-to-day healthcare.

AI is no longer the thing of Hollywood movies, it can deliver faster, better patient care. Right now. Making health care a cutting-edge industry.

Considering Australia’s healthcare model has remained largely unchanged for decades, AI is a technology to be embraced as an effective tool for advancing patient care and alleviating the strain on the public healthcare system.

Innovative health-tech companies such as Navigator Group, a leading recovery service for people injured at work or in motor vehicle accidents, are already using AI to better target patient care and improve diagnosis and recovery times.  

We see huge potential in emerging technologies, such as equipment that assesses a patient’s eye gaze in response to stimuli to detect conditions like PTSD and depression. And AI tools that assess facial expressions and vocal qualities in casual conversations to help identify psychological and neurological disorders.

Navigator Group is actively engaged in the research and development in these areas using AI and ML to help shape a better future for healthcare in Australia and around the globe.

AI also presents a more cost-effective way to heal patients, ensuring more time and money can be spent on patient care and less on administrative tasks such as screening processes and data entry. 

There is a staggering backlog of individuals with physical or mental injuries from work or motor vehicle-related accidents who cannot get adequate care quickly, buckling an already stretched system. Emerging platforms and technologies driven by AI can speed up referrals by identifying availabilities in clinicians’ timetables, accelerating administrative processes, and giving patients quicker access to immediate care, which means less pain and suffering across the system.

ML algorithms can also match patients with healthcare professionals who have exceptional results in a particular area of care. For example, Navigator Group uses questionnaires to assess a patient’s mental state during whiplash recovery. AI is used to evaluate their answers and identify the complexity of their trauma, so they can then be allocated to a suitably experienced clinician. Without the assistance of this unique algorithm, identifying significant trauma in our patients would take longer and could therefore impact their access to urgent treatment. 

AI should be viewed as a complementary tool in the healthcare sector, rather than an absolute solution. Like many other tools that have become a mainstay in society – such as face recognition, digital assistants, social media apps and e-commerce – healthcare still requires an element of human oversight and care to manage complex human interactions.

To suggest that AI could completely replace trusted health professionals would be taking things too far. There will always be a need for ongoing training and education for health experts to ensure AI tools can be used both effectively and ethically. However, when used responsibly, AI has the immense power to improve the lives of millions of Australians. It can also be used to speed up intellectual labour such as collating previous research, generating ideas for future research and training healthcare professionals.

Moving forward, it is the responsibility of the whole healthcare industry to ensure the ethical integration of AI into our systems and practices. Healthcare professionals should treat AI/ML tools with cautious optimism by embracing the potential of new technologies to transform our healthcare systems for the better.

Dr John McMahon is a clinical psychologist and the director of science at Navigator Group.