ServiceNow, Healthcare & Gen AI: Improving Patient Outcomes
As AI continues to boom during an era of digital transformation, the healthcare industry stands to reap the benefits of the new technology.
With this in mind, plenty of companies are working to improve the use of generative AI (Gen AI) across the healthcare sector to accelerate areas like drug discovery and development - and improve treatment for patients as a result.
In particular, to improve patient experience, ServiceNow is working to digitise and automate siloed processes by creating more intelligent workflows for the industry. By introducing AI further into healthcare, the company hopes to scale its capabilities to deliver smoother and more integrated experiences to improve patient care.
Working to improve overall patient outcomes
ServiceNow ultimately works to help its customers upscale their digital transformation efforts to create sustainable value and enable better organisational change. Within healthcare, the company believes that AI opens up myriad opportunities to better patient care and wellbeing, in addition to improving other areas of the industry.
In fact, the company’s Chief Transformation Officer, Manish Shah, believes that the application of AI in healthcare could be transformative for the industry.
“Neural networks are using AI to generate healthcare advances, from disease diagnosis to new drug development and treatment methods,” ServiceNow’s Chief Transformation Officer, Manish Shah, tells our sister publication Healthcare Digital. “Over the past few years, we have seen how a combination of computer science and machine learning advancements can create neural networks that mimic the human brain. They can classify and cluster data at a high velocity, with analysis taking minutes versus the hours it takes when performed by humans.”
Having to cater to high demands, the healthcare system can often be complicated to navigate, with patients having different or inconsistent experiences. Shah explains that this can be the case within siloed systems, as a patient journey can generate a large digital footprint and make it more challenging for healthcare professionals to make fast decisions.
“The [current] excitement around Gen AI is its ability to deliver more precise, targeted intelligence using large language models that take in large volumes of data and then simulates all the possibilities based on algorithms and history,” Shah says. “With Gen AI, we can go well beyond sharing individual data points. We can assimilate and integrate disparate signals into an intelligent layer that merges the data into a holistic picture across devices and inputs.
“AI can take individual patient neural sensory networks and bring all the data into one intelligent layer, making it easier for caregivers to respond to the alerts and signals that matter the most. Gen AI helps identify the right resource to oversee patient care and take action at the right time.”
In order to accelerate AI adoption and faster and earlier patient diagnoses, the UK Department of Health and Social Care (NHS) allocated a £21m (US$26.4m) fund to implement the technology. With a primary objective of reducing the time taken to diagnose life-threatening illnesses for patients, the strategy was praised for its potential to transform healthcare as we currently understand it.
Keeping AI ethics at the centre
ServiceNow has consistently been working towards enterprise AI developments, having partnered with NVIDIA in May 2023 to build Gen AI to transform business processes. By expanding ServiceNow’s extensive functionality by introducing new use cases, the partnership goal was to revolutionise overall enterprise use of AI by strengthening workflow automations and increasing productivity.
Particularly when it comes to healthcare use cases, the company works to offer information to staff to improve care and reduce patient readmission rates. It believes that AI will contribute towards a smoother, more integrated patient and provider experience.
Part of this is to ensure that organisations are boosting their AI use with integrated ethics into the AI models - keeping patients safe.
Shah adds: “The real promise of AI technology lies in providing the intelligence to deliver a safer, higher quality of patient care. Technology is advancing in real time, delivering visual information that is like what a human sees when they walk into a patient's room and can create a more productive, effective workforce that knows precisely which situations require human intervention and can communicate what is needed in a timely manner.”
“As an organisation, it is important to think about building the basic core elements of ethics, governance, and morals guard rails into AI models. Modelling best practices must align with basic principles for your organisation, such as delivering the best patient care.
“In the future, a regulatory body may dictate what those principles are, but as healthcare professionals we need to make sure they are part of AI policies from day one.”
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