The impetus is on US health systems to reassess their infrastructure and emerging technology investments in the wake of the pandemic and to make sure their efforts not only support the future of healthcare delivery but also provide services more efficiently and affordably.
Healthcare leaders are striving towards their ideas of the hospital of the future even though there is no universally accepted definition of a smart hospital. Health institutions are currently transforming into smart hospitals with the use of digital solutions like AI.
Health care and artificial intelligence
A smart hospital inspires action, according to several experts Insider Intelligence talked with. By creating automation around the data, it effectively uses AI and machine learning to not only learn from the data but also act on it. According to Dr. Andrew Gostine, CEO of Artisight, a manufacturer of IoT sensor networks, “a smart hospital takes in information from sensors, processes it in the data centre, and then triggers a consequence.” A smart hospital will begin offering clinical treatment in this fashion, just like clinicians do.
In the hospital of the future, AI technology will be crucial. Intelligent healthcare solutions use AI to gather and process data, then automate processes based on the information. Healthcare executives in the US are more interested than ever in AI and automation technology as a result of the pandemic.
61% of executives said their company intended to use AI or machine learning technology in the following year. That is a lot more than the 38% of respondents who stated that their firm was currently implementing the technology. According to a Guidehouse survey conducted by the Healthcare Financial Management Association in February 2021, half of hospital or health system leaders said their organisation had either deployed automation technology or had seen positive results from automation investments and was expanding capabilities in that vein (HFMA). In a similar 2020 poll, only 15% responded in the same manner.
In fact, the Guidehouse analysis found that since 2020, the number of US hospitals using automation technologies has tripled.
Implementing AI in healthcare
Several businesses have released platforms and services over the past year that make it easier to construct diverse AI healthcare solutions. For instance, in May 2020, Nvidia introduced Clara Guardian, a partner ecosystem and application framework that combines multimodal AI and smart sensors to support the development of smart hospital solutions such as fall detection, infection control, heat sensing, and patient monitoring.
Olive created an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that uses natural language processing (NLP) technology and combines patient data on various surgical procedures into cohorts of related cases for Intermountain Healthcare, a health facility situated in Salt Lake City. The business also collaborated extensively with surgeons to identify the causes of clinical variances. The business claimed that this approach produced savings of tens of millions of dollars over several years in 2018.
To improve care pathways for pneumonia, Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine, Florida, used AI software created by Ayasdi. According to a Healthcare Innovation story from April 2019, the collaboration allowed the hospital to save $1,350 per pneumonia patient and cut down the length of stay by two days.
