Accenture’s New AI And Me Within Healthcare

Accenture’s new AI and Me trend looks to explore “how leading enterprises are fostering human-AI collaboration—bringing AI’s near-limitless capabilities together with people’s ability to direct and refine ideas.” Prior to COVID-19, artificial intelligence was already a very important aspect for many industries. However, now amid the transition to remote working, AI has become an even more significant and necessary component for success. As it pertains to the short term uses, it’s quite apparent that “workforces desperately need augmentation. Already, human-AI collaboration is playing a role in the race to find a COVID-19 vaccine. Outside the medical field, the pandemic is introducing new constraints and challenges that AI systems can help overcome. AI can help people dream up new solutions and ideas to build a more flexible organization” When it comes to the long-term uses for AI, the current pandemic will “enable us to see human-AI collaboration at its best, potentially easing people’s concerns about the technology.”

In regards to the Healthcare sector, the growing need for artificial intelligence as a technological facet within the constantly evolving healthcare industry “has been a constantly tracked trend in the course of the past three year’s Digital Health Technology Vision reports. This past year explored how many business leaders are facilitating collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence. Many organizations in the healthcare world have implemented artificial intelligence as well as additional technology tools into their standard work nature, with a particular emphasis on both automation and execution. Systems equipped with artificial intelligence can enable health care providers in screening an abundance of patients or enhancing an efficient data configuration of supply chains affected by COVID-19.

While artificial intelligence can do a vast array of tasks to improve the efficiency and overall success of many corporations, solely using AI for the purpose of making an organization run its processes more quickly or more cheaply would not be using artificial intelligence to its full potential. AI can become “an agent of change, transforming not just how organizations do work—but also what they actually do.” Artificial intelligence is unique in that it offers a distinct advantage familiar to successful startup companies: the technology “doesn’t approach a problem based on years of experience or inherent human biases. It hasn’t yet learned what not to try. This blank slate offers fertile ground for transformation in healthcare.”

In this new period of remote working, 69% of healthcare organizations are now adopting artificial intelligence technology and it’s no wonder why. Many cellular devices such as smartphones are now equipped with “sensors [that] can continuously monitor a variety of health issues, including respiratory conditions. Algorithms identify and classify the severity of coughs or flag breathing irregularities so that care providers can intervene when issues arise, no matter where the person is when they arise. Human-AI collaboration is playing a role in the race to find a COVID-19 vaccine. Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based biotech company, has repurposed its AI platform to help expedite the development of a COVID-19 drug, using machine learning to speed up the drug discovery process”. Simply put, there is both a need and opportunity for artificial intelligence within the workplace, as this technology could greatly reduce the workload and burden for many organizations on a global scale.

While this Accenture recently organized an experimental research project aimed at identifying the potential for humans to train artificial intelligence for medical coding and whether or not this could improve the overall performance of the system as a whole when it comes to identifying links. The team behind this project stated that the parameters and processes established were designed so that “medical coders could train the AI, giving AI a front seat to knowledge generation—which allowed it to learn better, thus making it a better tool for coders. The coders learned to think like data scientists and the AI learned to think like coders. We learned that human-machine collaboration, along with embedding AI in the process and feedback loop, enabled explainable, more trustworthy results.”

While this is just one example of a transition and shift in work, it’s quite apparent that as machines begin to take on simple tasks, many people and important employees throughout an organization will be able to spend much more of their time and energy on more valuable initiatives and work at a higher cognitive level. Many “healthcare enterprises must look at the new skills needed to enable fluid interactions between humans and machines, and the workforce models needed to support these new forms of collaboration. Only 39% of healthcare organizations report that they have an inclusive design or human-centric design principles in place to support human-machine collaboration.”

A COVID-19 screener based upon artificial intelligence has actually been created by Partners HealthCare. This screener is meant to assist in determining whether or not each specific patient should be tested or evaluated for COVID-19. As it pertains to the details of this particular screening assessment, artificial intelligence is able to use a simple and easy to use chat interface to provide a series of questions for each patient to answer. These questions help with “pre-hospital triage” and then aids in the system screening a high number of patients quickly and effectively. Using artificial intelligence as an incorporated aspect of this system not only allows for increased efficiency and ameliorates the quality of COVID-19 tests offered but also “alleviates the burden on the organization’s hotline and reduces the number of patients visiting facilities in person for assessment.”

The many applications for AI within the healthcare industry exemplify the potential for organizations to vastly improve their performance and adaptability to technology in this unprecedented time. The many data points, research conclusions, and successful applications so far signify that artificial intelligence may very well be a significant component to the future of healthcare.