Establishing Better Health Care Outcomes through AI – MedCity News

The conundrum of American health care has become all too familiar: While spending outpaces other high-income countries, our quality of care often lags our peers – demonstrating no real correlation between high costs and outcomes. In fact, the U.S has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, and the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions.

Simply put, national health care costs are too high and rising too fast (projected to increase by 5.6% annually), care quality is poor for many, and access to care is highly dependent on where you live and how much you earn. These three key aspects of health care – access, cost, and quality – determine patient outcomes. Our nation has long held the belief that it’s impossible to improve one area without sacrificing another – creating a ripple effect of patient and economic hurdles across the health care system. 

It’s incumbent on each of us to challenge this status quo. To do so, we must champion innovative solutions that leverage AI to revolutionize care delivery, so that clinical expertise is available to everyone, everywhere at an affordable price point. The scaling power of AI can simultaneously remove barriers to access, drive costs down system-wide (a win-win for employers and patients alike) and elevate the role of the human clinician so they can focus on human touch that their patients need.

Broader, more equitable access

First, digital care solutions that leverage AI greatly improve access by bringing clinical care and expertise into the comfort of patients’ homes. This eliminates the numerous barriers to in-person care, such as long waits, scheduling conflicts, and lack of access to transportation. AI’s ability to guide and deliver clinician-led treatments in an empathetic and human-like manner means that patients get the best of both worlds: the expertise of a human clinician leading the charge of their care, plus the convenience and flexibility to access that care on their own terms. 

Solutions like AI care specialists can work alongside human clinicians to make world-class care available anytime, anywhere. These specialists offer several benefits, including the ability to engage in dialogue in real time to assess how patients are feeling, suggest changes to the treatment and provide motivation and feedback as they progress. 

Higher efficiency, lower costs

At the same time, the use of AI helps to powerfully combat the high costs often associated with receiving care. Digital solutions built around AI reduce costs for patients and payers by preventing wasteful spending on avoidable care — both by improving access to early detection and preventive care, and by making it more convenient for patients to stick with preventive courses of treatment that will help them avoid costly interventions down the line. 

And, according to McKinsey, the widespread adoption of AI for health care automation and analytics could save the U.S. up to $360 billion in annual health care spending. Using AI to automate time-consuming mundanities like scheduling, care coordination, documentation, and billing not only saves money, but also reduces clinician burnout — as does AI’s ability to guide patients through certain types of treatment without the clinician who is overseeing the treatment having to be physically present, meaningfully driving down the cost of care without sacrificing any clinical rigor.

More precision, better outcomes

Finally, digital solutions powered by AI raise the standard of care quality. Not only do they create a world in which every patient can have a world-class clinician in their home, they also bring a new level of precision to the care clinicians are able to deliver. 

Take physical therapy (PT) as a case study here. With traditional PT, the patient typically sees the clinician in person once a week and is expected to complete additional exercise sessions as homework. The therapist cannot be physically present for those at-home sessions, and therefore has no way of knowing whether the patient is completing them at all, much less doing every exercise with proper form. AI-powered digital PT, on the other hand, uses state-of-the-art motion tracking technology to detect patients’ precise movements as they perform exercises at home, providing them with real-time feedback on form. Then, after each session, AI provides the patient’s physical therapist with data-driven insights and performance metrics, helping them to better understand the patient’s progress and limitations so they can adjust their program accordingly. 

The session data that AI can provide clinicians is far more detailed and accurate than even their human eye would have been, had they been physically in the room with the patient – enabling the clinician to build ultra-personalized care programs based on nuanced data. This leads to better health outcomes and, by extension, greater ROI for employers who choose an AI-powered digital PT solution.

The health care system of the future must leverage AI to do what it does best, empowering clinicians to do what they do best. As the largest and most sophisticated purchasers of health care, employers can help accelerate this change — making digital solutions that leverage AI more accessible by integrating them into benefit plans.

Photo: tonefotografia, Getty Images

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