Artificial intelligence is already having a profound impact on the health service, improving the patient experience, protecting clinician time, drive patient safety and even prevent healthcare with its ability to detect disease before it manifests.
That’s the view of Jens Dommel, who is the head of healthcare for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at Amazon Web Services (AWS). “AI is primed to aid healthcare in addressing some of its biggest challenges,” he states.
The first goal, he says, is to improve the person’s experience of the healthcare system and offer them support in managing their own healthcare in all circumstances, whether they have a young family or are ageing. Meanwhile, from the provider’s perspective, the aim is to improve their own clinical experience – a big challenge in healthcare systems globally. “There is a big gap in the number of clinicians the health system has and what it actually needs – the World Health Organisation is forecasting a shortfall of up to 10 million in 2030,” Dommel notes. With this huge work burden, clinician burnout is very real, he adds.
The cost of providing healthcare continues to mount, and, according to Dommel, AI offers the possibility of a truly “sustainable and resilient” health system. It can be deployed, he says, to increase access and address inherent inequity in the system, bringing appropriate healthcare to all those who need it.
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Every two years the volume of healthcare data doubles, much of which is raw and untapped; Dommel says estimates suggest as much as 97 per cent of healthcare data goes unused, largely because it is unstructured. “Even if it is digitised, it may just be in pdf format. We don’t have a lack of data, we have a lack of access to that data. We need to turn that data into value, into outcomes, and that is what AI can help us do.”
AI has the power to address these big roadblocks to better healthcare and improved patient outcomes. Dommel cites a number of examples where the technology is already in use, driving efficiencies and freeing up valuable clinician time. An Irish customer of AWS is T-Pro, who have developed an ambient listening solution where the AI can summarise entire medical consultations into clinical notes, to be added to electronic healthcare records. In the area of diagnostics, another AWS customer and Irish company xWave Technologies uses AI to vet radiology referrals to ensure patients get the best test first, reducing time, cost, and getting patients diagnosed quicker. In a project carried out at St Vincent’s University Hospital and the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin, xWave’s implementation reduced the number of CTs and MRIs needed by 61 per cent.
All this and more is possible because of what Dommel calls “the democratisation of AI; we want for every company and every institution to be able to become an AI organisation” he explains. “For AWS, our vision is to make AI easy and secure to use, easy to build, affordable to run, and scale, in a trustworthy way.” AWS provides a global cloud infrastructure, including a region located in Dublin, that allows their healthcare customers to create secure, resilient, and scalable applications – and was recently awarded “Best in Klas” for public cloud in healthcare. They also provide access to foundation models from a number of AI companies and a cost effective place to train and fine-tune their customers’ own proprietary models. “Customers have the choice to use any of the different models or combine them, because there is no one size fits all model that solves everything, instead we see there are specific models for specific use cases and the quality of the outcome is key.”
Dommel shares that AI has the potential to become part of every single use case in the healthcare space. “The value is in better outcomes but also better predictive ability so that we prevent diseases before they happen,” he says. “AI will help us in that, not least in Ireland where we are seeing lots of new digital programmes being introduced by the HSE that will transform how healthcare is delivered here. It’s an exciting time. We are committed to partnering on this digital transformation in Ireland.”
For all AI’s promise, Dommel stresses that the purpose is not to replace doctors and nurses with technology. “It’s important to think about AI as a new member of the care team.”
