There is lot of buzz going around on “AI and as a healthcare provider” it does need a closer look at the opportunities in this area. 121 health AI and machine learning companies raised $2.7 billion in 206 deals between 2011 and 2017. Market is abuzz with news of how artificial intelligence (AI) is going to change health care & as a result several AI technologies are cropping up to help people streamline administrative and clinical health care processes. The field of health AI is seemingly wide—covering wellness to diagnostics to operational technologies—but it is still narrow in that health AI applications typically perform just a single task.

Some of the interesting work which companies are doing including clinical decisions support system for stroke prevention, tracking patient vitals on the move & managing home-care. If we start using AI for all the data we are generating today it can make a huge difference in diagnosis as well as preventive and corrective treatment.

AI today is more prevalent in assisting frontline clinicians to be more productive and in making back-end processes more efficient—but we are still some time away from AI apps making clinical decisions or improving specific clinical outcomes- which is the need of the current healthcare space. Clinical applications are still rare. Some of the potential areas where we can expect the market to grow based on what we have seen in 2018 are :-

1. Robotic assisted surgery replacing humans
2. Virtual nursing assistance due to labour shortages
3. Administrative work flow improving the existing infrastructure
4.Fraud detection
5. Preliminary diagnosis
6. Automated Image diagnosis
7. more and more…

For a software development house above are opportunities to be tapped provided one does understand it as a whole and not sum of all parts – which mean commands over writing software code will not be sufficient, one has to understand the entire paradigm of understanding what and why apart from how of the software being developed. More later….