AI-First Healthcare

Introduction

Across the world, healthcare systems face enormous challenges, including lack of access, cost, waste, and an aging population. Pandemics like coronavirus (COVID-19) create severe strain on healthcare systems, resulting in shortages of personal protective equipment, insufficient or inaccurate diagnostic tests, overburdened clinicians, and imperfect information sharing, to name a few important effects. More importantly, a healthcare crisis such as COVID-19 or the emergence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the 1980s highlights the stark reality of shortcomings in our health systems. We can reimagine and realize systems of care and back-office healthcare systems, as healthcare crises accentuate current problems, such as:

• Inequitable access to healthcare

• Insufficient on-demand healthcare services

• High costs and lack of price transparency

• Significant waste

• Fragmented, siloed payer and provider systems

• High business frictions and poor consumer experiences

• Record keeping frozen since the 1960s

• Slow adoption of technological advances

• Burnout of healthcare providers, with the inability of clinicians to remain educated on the newest advances in medicine based on the volume of data to be absorbed

As we focus on these problems, we should recognize they are interdependent, giving the illusion of healthcare as being complex, when in reality healthcare is delivered through complex systems. That’s not to say providing excellent healthcare isn’t challenging; however, we can ...