How To Make Sure No One Is Left Behind In The Era Of AI In Healthcare

How To Make Sure No One Is Left Behind In The Era Of AI In Healthcare Erez Meltzer, Forbes Councils Member

Erez Meltzer, CEO & Board Member of Nanox, is a prominent Israel business leader with 35+ years experience leading various global companies.

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In a small village in rural Ghana, a woman waits—not days or weeks, but months—for abdominal imaging her physicians say she urgently needs. The doctors think it’s something impacting her liver but need a CT scan for confirmation. Her family waits, too. Life-saving therapy is delayed with potentially tragic consequences, all for want of a CT scan.

Sadly, that is the plight today for nearly 70% of the world’s population who don’t have access to basic medical imaging. This means two-thirds of humanity can’t receive screening, diagnosis and monitoring of potential bone fractures, diseases and cancers, leaving billions of people without the ability to timely identify their health issues before they potentially turn life-threatening.

As the world grapples with artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot technology, such as ChatGPT, AI appears poised to disrupt all sectors of the economy. It’s already becoming a part of everyday conversation. In healthcare, there’s no shortage of op-eds discussing this watershed moment for health systems, with wide-ranging applications for physicians and patients alike. But which patients and which physicians, exactly?

While implementing AI requires a certain level of infrastructure and technology, the truth is that, with proper investments and partnerships in place, it can be used by healthcare organizations around the world to address challenges in health service delivery, diagnosis and supply chain management, while saving cost in the long run. We know that health inequities exist in lower-income and remote communities—perhaps digital innovation has finally reached a tipping point in helping close these health equity gaps in access to care and ensure that no patient is left behind.

The Growing Digital Divide

Health inequity can take many forms. For example, in healthcare, we are seeing a growing digital divide between high-income countries and those considered to be low- and middle-income. The Covid-19 pandemic thrust telemedicine and digital healthcare into the spotlight, rapidly normalizing its use in supplementing and even replacing in-person care via digitally enabled tools. From virtual doctors’ appointments, diagnostics and wearable devices to personalized medicine, in high-income communities, new technologies and AI have revolutionized the industry and are quickly becoming the norm.

While Covid-19 accelerated this “new” way of life and delivery of healthcare, many communities without access to resources that we think of as basic necessities, such as high-speed internet, mobile phones or simply an understanding of digital tools, were left behind. As healthcare fast tracks toward a digital, connected future, as a global society, we must ensure that these tools do not widen this already expansive gap. Instead, we should harness digital technology and AI and use them to help close equity gaps in healthcare.

For the technological advancements being made in healthcare to reach all corners of the Earth, we need to start further upstream. More organizations and people will only be able to have access to these tools and be brought into the fold with the digital infrastructure necessary to lay the proper groundwork to use them.

Healthcare organizations and leaders can begin achieving this by developing a digital strategy with a road map for adopting and implementing new technologies, inclusive of standardizing data collection and enabling efficient data processing. Another way to help establish widespread connectivity and accessibility is to offer patient broadband access support, ensuring reliable and affordable access to the internet, with online health content available in different languages. While requiring substantial upfront investment, underlying IT infrastructure and greater digitization of fundamental processes will improve hospital efficiency and patient outcomes.

Using AI To Build A Strong Digital Foundation

A strong digital foundation is no small undertaking; however, it will pave the way for more advanced technologies, like AI, to step in and deliver faster, better and more accessible care for a broader universe of patients.

AI and its ability to analyze vast amounts of data help improve the speed and accuracy of diagnosis and screening for diseases. This is especially apparent in radiology, where a recent study demonstrated that an AI system was shown to have comparable efficacy as compared to radiologists in the screening and detecting of breast cancers.

To be clear, I’m not saying that AI can replace radiologists. But AI can certainly assist with clinical care by automating administrative tasks and helping to drive patient engagement. Not to mention, AI can also digest massive amounts of data sets to support diverse public health interventions, such as disease surveillance, outbreak response and health systems management. These capabilities can greatly impact resource-poor countries, rural communities around the world and other places where patients have restricted access to care.

Bridging The Gaps In Access To Health Services Through AI

Today, there’s also good news in places like Nigeria and Mexico, where companies are utilizing AI to provide better patient tools. Ubenwa, a Nigerian startup, is leveraging AI to create accessible, clinical-grade infant monitoring tools to improve the diagnosis of birth asphyxia in low-resource settings. And in Mexico, a company called Clínicas del Azúcar is utilizing AI to personalize patient care and improve quality and treatment outcomes for thousands of middle-to-low-income patients at risk for diabetes.

This is just the beginning. AI is bound to be as omnipresent in healthcare as the internet, which is why we must do the work upfront to make sure no one is left behind.

I envision a world where access to basic healthcare like medical imaging is as accessible and commonplace as water and electricity—a world where a woman in Ghana can get a lifesaving scan the same day she needs it, not after months of waiting. Through a combination of increased digital infrastructure and the implementation of artificial intelligence, healthcare organizations, governments and providers will be better equipped to address the challenges in pursuing optimal health for all.

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