Predicting Where AI Will Have the Biggest Impact on Healthcare

Some of the angst around the rapid pace of change involving artificial intelligence involves concern that the robots are going to replace radiologists or other clinicians. In a March 7 online discussion sponsored by Harvard Business Review, two Accenture executives stressed that in clinical settings, AI will gradually be introduced to assist clinicians and that initially it will have the biggest impact on back-office operations.

In 2019, the most common uses are in cybersecurity and authentication, payment and customer services, in part because they don’t have issues around the validity of algorithms or the complexity of clinical decision making to overcome, said Kaveh Safavi, M.D., Accenture’s global health industry lead. “Initially, larger-scale uses will not be in clinical domains. There is a long, uphill climb around clinical decision making. That is how it is playing out right now.”

The U.S. has already seen the benefits of automation to shift some routine tasks to machines, Safavi said. “With AI, we begin to shift non-routine tasks to machines,” he explained. What has captured our imagination in healthcare is the idea that a machine can substitute for a doctor. That is not what anyone studying this area thinks is going to happen, he said. Clinical judgement is quite significant. Technology can take some tasks over, but cannot replace a physician or nurse.

Safavi explained that healthcare is faced with trying to improve access, affordability and effectiveness at a time when there is expected to be considerable shortages of healthcare workers. “AI has given us an opportunity to address those issues,” he said.