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Max Votek, co-founder and managing partner at Customertimes . High costs, long wait times and mixed patient outcomes pose a challenge for the U.S.
healthcare system. But there’s good news—there’s a new treatment currently undergoing clinical trials that could help cure the sector’s issues and nurse it back to full strength: artificial intelligence (AI). With the potential to take some of the burden off of overworked healthcare professionals, improve diagnostic and treatment accuracy and help develop powerful new drugs, the public is already opening its arms to AI in the hopes of a better future for healthcare.
Making Healthcare More Affordable The U.S. offers access to a wealth of top specialists and cutting-edge treatments, but quality care is often a luxury available exclusively to those who can afford it.
Although 92% of the U.S. population now has some form of healthcare insurance, plans are often limited in what they cover and patients are at the mercy of insurers, who decide whether a recommended treatment is necessary.
Likewise, affordability poses a problem even for many of those with coverage, with 37% of surveyed adults admitting they or a family member has recently delayed or skipped treatment due to cost—going without vital treatments and medications that would improve their quality of life. Our research of 2,000 Americans revealed that affordability is among the primary issues that the public believes AI will address, with one in four confident it will cut the costs of healthcare—and the early signs are certainly promising. For many low-income individuals who may not be able to afford a doctor’s visit, rather than putting off treatment, they could visit a virtual doctor powered by an advanced large language model (LLM).
Supplied with the patient’s symptoms and historical medical records, algorithms can pinpoint the likely issue and suggest the best course of action, saving patients on initial consultation costs. It’s estimated that AI for medical diagnosis could reduce overall treatment costs by as much as 50% . Such technology could make basic healthcare services affordable for more Americans.
Improving Access And Accuracy There's a severe shortage of doctors, and the situation is only getting worse. By the end of 2024, it’s estimated that the U.S.
will need an additional 64,000 physicians to meet current demand. With healthcare workers in short supply, patients—especially those in rural and underserved areas—face longer wait times for appointments. Despite timely access to treatment often being critical to recovery, new patients in the U.
S. face an agonizing 26-day wait to see a physician on average. However, AI could help fill the staffing gap, taking on much of the diagnostic and administrative workload.
Algorithms can analyze patients at scale to help determine treatments, and chatbots could deliver basic communications, leaving doctors free to focus on those in critical need of care. However, accessibility and affordability aren’t the only issues that patients believe AI can help cure. Our research shows that some 43% also believe advancing technology can improve diagnostic accuracy, and one in three are convinced it will improve patient outcomes.
Developing The Drugs Of Tomorrow The heterogeneity of diseases calls for a diverse range of medicines. Take cancer, for instance, which encompasses a wide range of conditions, each with distinct characteristics. There’s no magic formula that will cure them all.
Each one requires specialized treatments, with cost and complexity often holding back development. The median cost for pharmaceutical companies to bring a new drug to market between 2009 and 2018 was $985 million , but not before undergoing a decade of trials and testing. For every treatment that reaches consumers, many more are shelved due to cost, developmental hurdles, poor results or regulatory challenges.
It’s consumers who foot the bill for these failed drugs. Although the price of a medication may seem exorbitant when compared to basic production costs, patients are ultimately covering the bill for its development and the many other treatments that never made it through testing. However, it’s hoped that in the near future, AI won’t just be helping prescribe medications but developing them—dramatically accelerating development schedules and reducing investment costs.
A streamlined development process means less cost for the pharmaceutical firm developing a drug and, you would hope, the patient who requires the treatment. Our research found that one in four Americans are optimistic about the potential of AI-developed drugs, with 56% believing they will help reduce the cost of healthcare. Mitigating The Challenges Of AI In Healthcare Training an AI algorithm requires substantial amounts of data, and importantly, it must include patients from all demographics—gender, age, ethnicity, geographical background and socioeconomic status.
Without this, there is a high risk of developing models that treat underrepresented patient groups unfairly. There are various ways healthtech developers can avoid introducing bias to their training models, whether it’s using supervised learning—labeling training data to guide algorithms as they learn—or conducting thorough ethical evaluations before they’re implemented. However, there's no substitute for diverse and authentic patient data.
This presents another challenge: convincing patients to allow the use of their data. Some 70% of Americans have expressed concerns about data privacy, with 56% admitting they find AI in healthcare “scary.” It isn’t helped by the growing number of data breaches in the healthcare space, with 88 million patients having had their personal health information compromised in data breaches last year alone.
Undoubtedly, if AI-powered healthcare is to maintain its trajectory, the sector will need to address these cybersecurity concerns. Offering A Lifeline AI is no longer a prospect but a reality today. It’s already being deployed in doctors’ offices and hospitals to analyze patient data, handle back-office tasks and assist surgeons.
Anticipated to decrease administrative costs by up to 30% , free up hundreds of thousands of hours of physicians’ time and cut surgical waiting times—for the millions of Americans currently suffering in silence, whether due to affordability or accessibility, AI will offer a lifeline. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?.
