Healthcare for a Changing World

With ageing populations in every country, the provision of health to all segments of the population is proving to be the biggest challenge for country leaders and healthcare providers. The nature of diseases has also been changing. Ageing problems related to diabetes, cardiac ailments, nervous and muscular weakening, memory loss and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and much-dreaded cancer are becoming more and more common and widespread as life expectancy increases and more people look forward to longer retirement periods and want to work and enjoy life through the autumn of their existence.

All this has placed substantial demands on primary and secondary healthcare systems in every country. The pressure on advanced economies like the United States of America, Western Europe, Japan and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries is being matched by the expectations from governments in developing nations like China, India and much of the Global South to invest more and demonstrate care for their citizens through improving focus on their well-being. We can broadly categorise the potential role of AI in four buckets: accuracy of data capture and timely dissemination, effective preventive care and early diagnosis, predictive and prescriptive healthcare for each citizen, and improvement of healthcare ecosystems in communities and countries. If addressed holistically with a real desire to transform, the results can be thoughtful and, in many cases, dramatic!

Timely and accurate data capture has many challenges. Data quality has always been suspect with many cases going unreported and undiagnosed. In advanced countries, data privacy considerations have also inhibited sharing of critical data, creating an inability to consolidate and come to any aggregate conclusions. AI has the potential to change this, gathering information from formal sources and informal exchanges, but the fine line between sharing and privacy has to be watched all the time. Availability of clean medical records for each citizen, to be made available to the doctor or surgeon the patient chooses to confide in, is one of the most fundamental imperatives, and AI has a role to play in identifying potential data sources as well as possible flaws in the gathered data.

In preventive care and diagnosis, AI has already started playing a very major role, with AI-driven risk assessments in communities based on living and eating habits and AI taking the lead in developing a baseline and triggering actions for disease prevention during normal times as well as during significant events like floods, cyclones and even epidemics. A number of measuring and early warning devices are prevalent today. Many hospitals in India use a number of devices to continuously track health in ageing populations and for post-hospitalisation patients who need regular monitoring. This also takes away the pressure from physical health check facilities and monthly visits to a general practitioner in already overcrowded medical systems. AI assistance in pathology, medical imaging analysis and telemedicine for remote consultations has already significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness and nationwide uniformity of medical consultations. The use of mixed-reality solutions like VR consultations with ‘experts’, which may soon happen in the metaverse, can have significant psychological and real impacts on citizens.