Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is among the current technology trends transforming the healthcare landscape. Its ability to create new content based on patterns it learns from datasets holds powerful implications for healthcare leaders. However, studies show that healthcare leaders see both advantages and challenges to adopting AI, with 35% citing ethics, privacy, and security concerns.
Understanding generative AI’s potential to revolutionize clinical decision-making, administrative tasks, and overall patient care is the first step to accessing its benefits and overcoming its challenges. In this guide, we’ll break down the emerging applications of generative AI in healthcare and the benefits these functions provide across the care continuum.
1. Personalized Treatment Plans
Across many industries, data drives precise planning — and the same can be said for healthcare. Generative AI can assist an analyst in reviewing a patient’s genetic makeup, medical history, lifestyle factors, and other relevant data to create personalized diagnoses and treatment plans.
This capability also extends to patient care before and after treatment. Employing predictive analytics in healthcare, which leverages AI along with statistical modeling and machine learning techniques, enables providers to predict health events before they ever occur.
Here are just a few applications of generative AI across the different stages of a patient’s care journey:
- Preventive care: Using its analysis of patient data, generative AI can predict health issues and recommend proactive interventions, such as lifestyle changes, screenings, or vaccines.
- Treatment reminders: AI-powered apps can send personalized reminders to patients, helping them stick to treatment plans, like a new medication, diet, or dental routine.
- Post-treatment advice: Providers can use generative AI to monitor patients’ adherence to post-treatment advice and develop individualized recovery plans that patients are receptive to.
Benefits: Generative AI produces higher treatment effectiveness by identifying health needs early and improving patient adherence to interventions.
2. AI-Generated Medical Documentation
Generative AI tools are typically powered by large language models (LLM), which understand human language and generate text. These models can streamline medical documentation by creating detailed medical notes, automating data entry, standardizing data formats, and more.
Using generative AI, providers can automatically develop:
- Clinical summaries: AI models can extract key insights from deep medical terminology to streamline note-taking and summarize critical documentation.
- Patient education materials: Analyzing patient diagnoses and treatment plans, generative AI can develop customized health guides that encourage patients to continue healthy habits at home.
- Patient discharge instructions: Generative AI can securely process medical histories, treatment plans, and physician notes to create customized discharge instructions in easily-digestible language.
Benefits: AI-generated medical documentation minimizes administrative burden for medical staff, saving time that they can reallocate to focus on patient care.
3. Drug Discovery and Development
With the right data sets, generative AI can assist an analyst in evaluating successful drugs’ chemical structures to identify and validate their relevance in certain disease pathways. While traditional drug discovery takes approximately 10 years on average, generative AI accelerates the process by:
- Analyzing molecular structures: Learning from known drug molecules, generative AI can create new compounds to achieve its desired result.
- Predicting potential drug candidates: Generative AI can automatically screen millions of molecular combinations to find promising candidates.
- Optimizing drug design for clinical trials: Before a clinical trial begins, generative AI predicts side effects and potential interactions with other drugs.
Benefits: Generative AI accelerates drug development, reaching faster treatments for diseases and reducing the cost of lengthy processes.
4. Virtual Health Assistants and Chatbots
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants provide real-time support, improving patient engagement and access to care. By automating personalized responses to patient queries, these chatbots can foster a comfortable and convenient environment for patients to receive medical advice.
Additionally, this technology tracks patient interactions and adds self-reported symptoms or conditions to a patient’s file. This way, providers can gather health data and engage patients as needed without waiting for the patient to initiate a real-time appointment.
Benefits: AI-powered patient communications help reduce patient anxiety with quick answers to medical questions. It can also make care more accessible to some patients while minimizing administrative burden on medical staff.
Final Thoughts: Implementing Generative AI in Healthcare
Generative AI’s transformative impact on the healthcare industry holds many positive implications for your organization. Effectively implementing this technology into your workflows starts with aggregating your existing data, collecting new data where necessary, and practicing strong data hygiene.
You’ll need effective data management solutions to handle the vast quantities of data required to leverage generative AI and deliver this data to AI models. Arcadia’s data management tools guide recommends looking for the following solutions:
- Data integration platform: The tool that aggregates health data into a central repository
- Comprehensive data collection, management, and analytics software: A solution that combines the two technologies above and enables providers to adopt effective data management strategies
- Data analytics technology: Platforms that apply data algorithms (including AI) to health data
To tap into the power of generative AI, your organization needs to understand its capabilities and apply them to relevant workflows. Over time, more applications will surface as patients, providers, and payers alike recognize the vast potential of this technology.
By Arcadia Director of Content Marketing Mike Doane
Beyond the Bite 