The global pandemic has forced us to rethink our existing healthcare system and has created a need to harness advances in technology. Vision-enabled Artificial Intelligence (AI) that combines Computer Vision and Machine Learning (ML) has the proven technologies and potential to improve patient care and hospital efficiencies.
With increasing disease complexities, rising expenses and shortcomings in infrastructure, the healthcare sector needs a panacea for development and growth. By deploying Vision AI, with little addition to existing infrastructure, hospitals and clinics can bring about a system of continuous quality improvement and make healthcare more accessible and inclusive.
The primary areas of Healthcare that are leveraging cutting-edge advances like Vision AI quicker than any other are research, diagnostics, health monitoring, treatment, patient outcomes, Covid protocol monitoring, and facilities management. Here’s a brief look at how.
Research, Diagnostics, Health Monitoring and Treatment
Vision-enabled AI, by developing patterns and correlations in events and data, paves the way for research discoveries that can be life-saving, and also help in error-free and speedy diagnosis that leads to precise and enhanced treatment.
What ML does is it provides, by identifying certain critical patterns and signals that the human mind might miss, an extended arm to the doctor to fine tune his interpretation of available medical data. Further, advanced video analytics, by providing facial analysis and subtle clues about a patient’s behaviour, can often enhance the physician’s own expertise to get an accurate understanding of what a person is actually experiencing, and ensuring that nothing goes unnoticed.
Elevated Patient Satisfaction
AI-driven innovations hold great potential in connecting better with patients by delivering more personalized care and streamlined services. By tracking nursing care to needy patients, patient mobility, tendency to wander from the bed zone, discomfort, injury-prone situations and unusual behavior, Vision AI is already playing a critical remote control role in the vital areas of Patient Safety and Patient Satisfaction. On the advanced technology front it is not far away that Vision-based patterns and insights on patient distress (through face expressions) will help detect instances of Shock or Cardiac so that critical medical attention can reach him in time.
Adherence to Safety protocols
The pandemic is driving changes in hospital safety and this is where the application of Vision AI can be effectively implemented straight away. Compliance monitoring in health centres is now automated and remotely controlled through practical applications that account for the importance of touch-free, contact-less in-patient care.
Vision AI, for instance, helps in tracking glove, gown, and mask utilization, and in analysing utilization of hand sanitizers/hand hygiene. These applications are now available to continuously check patients, hospital staff, vendors and visitors for all contamination protocols to ensure compliance throughout critical areas. It can detect and alert, in real time, patient flow and crowding of waiting rooms and corridors such that compliance protocols are not violated.
Quicker Turn around
At a time when hospital occupancy is at an abnormal high, making room for more patients has also become a top priority. In large facilities operational efficiency jumps multi fold by automating room assignment, tracking room turnover step-by-step, and detecting the true cause of delays.Vision Intelligence can easily be integrated with existing facilities management systems to remotely monitor patient discharge, room cleaning and readiness so as to reduce turn-around time to the minimum and optimize patient flow.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has opened our eyes to the need of better support to our hospitals and essential frontline workers who risk their lives to keep us healthy and safe. As AI is increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives, it is time we harness it to build a smarter and more connected healthcare system that benefits all of us, every day.