AI (Artificial Intelligence): What’s The Next Frontier For Healthcare?

Perhaps one of the biggest opportunities for AI (Artificial Intelligence) is the healthcare industry. According to ReportLinker, spending on this category is forecasted to jump from $2.1 billion to $36.1 billion by 2025. This is a hefty 50.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

So then what are some of the trends that look most interesting within healthcare AI? Well, to answer this question, I reached out to a variety of experts in the space.

One of the key trends is the use of health AI to spur the transition of medicine from reactive to proactive care. Machine learning-based applications will preempt and prevent disease on a more personal level, rather than merely reacting to symptoms. Providers and payers will be better positioned to care for their patients’ needs with the tools to delay or prevent the onset of life-threatening conditions. Ultimately, patients will benefit from timely and personalized treatment to improve outcomes and potentially increase survival rates.

In the next five years, consumers will gain more access to their health information than ever before via mobile electronic medical records (EMR) and health wearables. AI will facilitate turning this mountain of data into actionable health-related insights, promoting personalized health and optimizing care. This will empower patients to take the driving wheel of their own health, promote better patient-provider communication and facilitate high-end healthcare to under-privileged geographies.

Today, there are millions of physiologic parameters which are extracted from a patient. I believe the next mega trend will be harnessing this AI-driven “Smart Data” to accurately predict and avoid adverse events for patients. The aggregate of this data will be used to formulate predictive analytics to be used across diverse patient populations across the continuum of care, which will provide truly personalized medicine.

Andrea Fiumicelli, who is the vice president and general manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at DXC Technology:

Ultimately, AI and data analytics could prove to be the catalyst in addressing some of today’s most difficult-to-treat health conditions. By combining genomics with individual patient data from electronic health records and real-world evidence on patient behavior culled from wearables, social media and elsewhere, health care providers can harness the power of precision medicine to determine the most effective approaches for specific patients.

This brings tremendous potential to treating complex conditions such as depression. AI can offer insights into a wealth of data to determine the likelihood of depression—based on the patient’s age, gender, comorbidities, genomics, life style, environment, etc.—and can provide information about potential reactions before they occur, thus enabling clinicians to provide more effective treatment sooner.

One key advance to consider is the use of carefully curated datasets to form Synthetic Control Arms as a replacement for placebo in clinical trials. Recruiting patients for randomized control trials can be challenging, particularly in small patient populations. From the patient perspective, while an investigational drug can offer hope via a new treatment option, the possibility of being in a control arm can be a disincentive. Additionally, if patients discover they are in a control arm, they may drop out or elect to receive therapies outside of the trial protocol, threatening the validity and completion of the entire trial.

However, thanks to advances in advanced analytics and the vast amount of data available in life sciences today, we believe there is a real opportunity to transform the clinical trial process. By leveraging patient-level data from historical clinical trials from Medidata's expansive clinical trial dataset, we can create a synthetic control arm (SCA) that precisely mimics the results of a traditional randomized control. In fact, in a recent non-small cell lung cancer case study, Medidata together with Friends of Cancer Research was successful in replicating the overall survival of the target randomized control with SCA. This is a game-changing effort that will enhance the clinical trial experience for patients and propel next generation therapies through clinical development.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2019/10/12/ai-artificial-intelligence--whats-the-next-frontier-for-healthcare/#234e34bd3353