How To Democratize Healthcare: AI Gives Everyone The Very Best Doctor

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in May 2018.

The biggest problem with health care in the United States, the world leader in health inequality, isn’t actually that quality of care The biggest problem we have is access to take care. According to the CDC, nearly 20% of adults in the United States have no regular source of health care. One of the most serious places is in life expectancy, where the richest Americans benefited from steady gains, about five years of extra longevity between 2000 and 2014, compared to the poorest, for whom, during the same period, life expectancy has not been. changed Absolutely not.

There are many factors contributing to this widening socioeconomic and medical divide, but one of the biggest is simply not having enough doctors in the right places. The best doctors and providers are drawn to similar circumstances: top-notch hospitals, with top-notch colleagues, in the most desirable places to live, with patients who can pay for services. But rising health care prices are also a critical part of the growing problem. The costs of treating chronic diseases such as diabetes continue to rise as the population ages. The rising cost of doctors (already high, rising 7-10% per year), pharmaceuticals, and expensive medical technology lies squarely in what is known as Eroom’s Law, the evil twin of the Moore’s Law, where the cost of health care is exponential. increases over time.

This leaves us with more needs, but fewer and more expensive providers. The pressing question today is: Can new technologies slow or even reverse the exponential rise in costs to help truly democratize healthcare? Today’s wealthiest patients not only benefit from being able to pay for the best medical services, but perhaps even fly somewhere to get the opinion of more than one of the best doctors in the world. Imagine if we could all do this: if to diagnose any condition, each patient convened, say, a conference call of the top 50 specialists in their field, who drew on their unique experiences and knowledge to confer and arrive at a consensus on a precise solution. diagnoses and treatment for that patient, which they had been following for years and years. Pretty good medical care, right? And probably the best possible current treatment for this patient. Unfortunately, there is no way that this kind of approach or scenario is feasible or scalable.

Extending and accelerating the human ability to gather and analyze evidence is exactly what artificial intelligence and machine learning do best. They tin bring 50 experts for a single patient, encoding the knowledge, taxonomy and understanding of these experts. Machine learning is based on what the best doctors have learned and now know: whether a suspicious-looking mole is malignant or benign, whether an irregular heartbeat could be atrial fibrillation. Machine learning would be nothing without this essential human input; technology trains and scales the knowledge of the best doctors. And modern AI has the remarkable ability to keep learning, continuing to identify new features in the data that will yield the most accurate diagnoses. This data is not drawn from a handful of patients seen in an exam room, but from thousands upon thousands of examples, more than most specialists will ever see in a lifetime.

The broadest and most important application of AI may be the amplification of our own collective wisdom. Click to tweet

Now imagine that your doctor had the ability to follow your individual history over time, thinking not only of the heartbeat that led you, or the suspicious mole, but knowing your entire history with a perfect memory and recollection. That’s what’s called longitudinal data: understanding how your health has been over time and what’s abnormal for you versus what’s abnormal for the general population. Like the best doctors, AI can be constantly retrained with new data sets to improve its accuracy, just as it learns something new from each patient, from each case. But AI’s unique ability to apply time series methods to understand a patient’s deviation from baseline at a granular level may allow us to achieve a statistical understanding of causality for the first time, to find out. exactly what elements of your particular lifestyle and/or treatment have led to your current state. In other words, while a good doctor might guess that a man might have prostate cancer because his PSA levels have risen above a “normal” threshold, a great doctor might suspect prostate cancer not because his PSA levels were high compared to the population, however high compared to their own baseline. In fact, that’s precisely how doctors discovered Ben Stiller’s cancer so early. AI understands how have you changed over time more than any human, and that, it turns out, is much more predictive.

The broadest and most important application of AI may be the amplification of our own collective wisdom. When you look at it like that, it starts to seem absurd that we’re relying on the opinion of a single doctor (or two, or three!), looking at data from a single person, taken from a single point in time. As excellent as this doctor is, people can, and inevitably do, make mistakes. But the wisdom of a multitude of doctors – hundreds, thousands of them – and the data of thousands and thousands of patients, with more every day, is very strong. The opinion of two doctors will never agree with terabytes of data. This is how human learning scales, just as the Internet allowed knowledge to spread faster than reading printed books. Imagine if doctors could telepathically teach each other their new discoveries. For modern AI methods, this is exactly what is happening.

Perhaps the most important form of AI capabilities super human can be the fact that the AI ​​can be replicated. trivially And at low cost. AI approaches are already often used with relatively modest computational requirements, sometimes with a single GPU or a few CPUs. Thanks to the continued push of Moore’s Law in this space, the cost of computing resources will soon be essentially free. So these 50-person conferences for a single patient, tracking the patient’s health throughout their life, no longer seem impossible. They start to look cheap and easy. And with the potential to reach corners of the world filled with physician shortages, from places near and far, such as prisons, rural US or developing countries, not only with a doctor, but the best doctor humanly possible.

But the democratization of healthcare will not happen by itself. The standard of care would have to change to incorporate this new technology. The use of AI should be seen as amplifier and climbing the best human skills, and as such has a natural place in virtually all areas of care, including prevention, diagnosis and treatment, from sending patients to the doctor at very early (previously undetectable) stages of disease to improve both outcomes and reduce costs. .

Escalating the doctor will not replace doctors. It will magnify them, expand their scope and allow the advice of 10,000 doctors to be recreated quickly and easily at a lower cost. Click to tweet

Escalating the doctor will not replace doctors. It will magnify them, expand their reach, make it possible to recreate the advice of 10,000 doctors quickly and easily at lower costs, and bring the best medical care to any corner of our country or the world. It could even reinvent what we think of as patient-doctor interactions. In the not-too-distant future, you might wake up, look in the mirror, use the toilet, and brush your teeth…where the mirror is AI-enabled to look for dermatology, ophthalmology, and musculoskeletal issues; the toilet will perform a urinalysis on urine analytes; and your toothbrush will collect DNA from your saliva, with doctors getting the updates they need to give you the best care. Making your own bathroom the doctor’s office for a mini physical every morning would yield a longitudinal analysis of months to years to decades of information about you and your deviation from your personal baseline. Imagine the benefits of the best doctors evaluating us every day, no matter how remote the area, all over the world, every day, throughout our lives. This has the potential to provide each of us with the best standard of care derived not just from your own, but from the longitudinal datasets of billions of people.

When it comes to AI and healthcare, it’s actually the the status quo we must be afraid Without these new technological tools, inequality will undoubtedly continue to worsen. With AI, we have the potential to offer everyone the best doctor, the best tests, the best analysis, anywhere in the world and at low cost, the potential to truly democratize healthcare.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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