Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Why Transparency Matters

The growing presence of artificial intelligence during the care delivery process continues to show potential for reduced physician burnout and more personalized treatment.

Progress is coming in many forms, including automated scan analyses, symptom-checking chatbots and extra help with medical coding and billing.

“At the end of the day, if we’re looking at how we can impact care and we want to do so in a way that’s going to be helpful,” said Ed Shaffer, healthcare and life sciences informatics director at Dell EMC, “then I think we’re in a state where we can’t continue to do things the way we’ve done them.”

The shift is underway: 85 percent of Americans commonly use AI in some form, a GE survey finds, and the use of AI could create $150 billion in annual savings for the U.S. healthcare economy by 2026, according to a recent Accenture report.

Still, advancing the movement requires strategy among developers to determine safe and appropriate use cases for AI — as well as staff who must learn to integrate the augmented offerings into their workflows and justify those functions to the public.

That was the key takeaway from a recent panel with Shaffer and other healthcare thought leaders, held virtually due to the cancellation of the HIMSS20 conference, on AI’s evolving capacity to enhance clinical decision-making.