Understanding the potential of AI for Digital Transformation In Healthcare

Over the past decades, new disruptive technologies have deeply changed society and business. Like many other sectors, healthcare is undergoing a deep transformation due to the implementation of digital and smart technologies. This phenomenon has been defined as “Digital Transformation”, a systemic process intended to radically change socio-economics dynamics through combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies. In healthcare such as in any other sector, digital transformation is not only about the transformative effect of advanced technologies but also about the ameliorative changes in health-related structures, processes, practices, and policies as well as in service quality, patient safety and well-being.
Healthcare digital transformation is not limited to the digitization of analogic processes and activities or to the implementation of well-known solutions, such as Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Telehealth and Telemedicine solutions, blockchain technologies, mobile health apps, and robots, but it is even more related to the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions.
AI is leading healthcare digital transformation, supporting and enhancing different strategic and operative processes.
AI influence on healthcare digital transformation started during the COVID-19 pandemic when it supported physicians to respond to the current outbreak contributing to the development of the vaccination medication. Starting from those days, AI has attracted growing public and private investments especially in healthcare because it contributes to improving internal processes’ efficiency and to better manage potential medical risks. To better exploit its potential, AI is growingly included in the digital transformation strategies of healthcare organizations not only to gain fast returns through cost reduction and better services, but also to improve strategic and operation management at different levels. To exploit AI potential, healthcare organizations should be more open and able to communicate a clear AI vision, promoting an innovation-oriented and data-oriented corporate culture able to discourage any resistance or mistrust in innovative solutions and technologies. Thus, AI is also a matter of culture and communication because its potential can be better exploited when health governance support such an organizational culture, the workforce in operationalizing AI applications, and in finding the right ecosystem partners to supplement technical needs. This is what proactive and innovation-oriented health organizations are currently working for, together with more technical applications pointing to radically transform health-related services, taking a step forward the predictive and personalized medicine based on unique health profiles, and personalized treatment options based on real data analysis. This possible because AI offers an unmatched capability in sorting enormous data collections, understanding them, and learning from them to reshape healthcare processes and services.
As Prerak Garg, a senior director at Microsoft, stated the real disruptive impact of AI in terms of healthcare digital transformation is related to its “unparalleled capability to process and analyse vast datasets far beyond human capacity, thus offering insights and predictions with unprecedented accuracy”. In fact, AI applications are also related to risk management because they significantly reduce medical errors due, among others, to misdiagnosis. This lead to develop the ability to create new and hybrid processes, not exclusively focused on well-established decision-making procedures but rather open to a heuristic problem solving pointing to find more than the right solution the most fitting solution at a specific point of time and in a specific situation.
Moving from managerial to operative medical activities, healthcare professionals’ operations have been transformed and supported, among others, by deep learning diagnostic performance models. These models support them in providing a high-quality service and in reducing medical errors. In this sense, one of the most interesting AI applications is based on predictive analytics, which makes it possible to predict future health-related outcomes, starting from the analysis of patients’ current health status or symptoms to drive physician decision-making processes toward the most fitting individual treatment. Consequently, AI is an essential leverage to fully accomplish healthcare transformation, boosting the shift from prescription medicine towards predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory medicine. So, the real contribution of AI to healthcare digital transformation comes not only from disruptive product or service innovations but also from organizational innovations dealing with brand-new or renewed processes able to improve efficiency and effectiveness as well as outcomes’ quality. This is because AI stuck in the middle of technology and medical service, impacting not only the medical practice, the related services, and the interactions with patients, but also healthcare management at all. Even though people are somewhat scared about its potential in replacing humans, AI is nourishing strategic and organization innovation, deeply transforming even the human capital management. This revolution is based on a data, intended as a valuable asset that makes health organizations able to proactively respond to social and market trends. In doing so, data and above all high-quality data can even transform human capital making it less focused on repetitive tasks and more committed into a creative approach to problem solving as well as in more impactful and strategic activities, making them not replaceable – as some of us still though – but rather even more empowered and involved into the creation of a high-quality, equal, open, and safer healthcare.