Opinion: Artificial intelligence a tool for Sask. health-care crisis

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It seems that artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm. There is a proliferation of AI stories in the news and social media about the potential and perils of AI and how it could reshape our lives.

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Almost every day we hear about the wonders and mistakes of AI software such as ChatGPT. But what are the realistic applications of AI in health care, and can it be used it to deal with the post-COVID pandemic health-care crisis that we are currently facing?

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AI is a set of technologies that allow computers or machines to simulate human intelligence, specifically the ability of problem solving and learning.

AI fields such as natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, deep learning and the ability to analyze massive amounts of data make AI particularly suited to health-care applications.

Streamlining administrative health processes would likely be one of the first large-scale applications of AI in health care.

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Improving patient flow, decreasing the burden of repetitive tasks and reducing administrative errors could diminish the administrative pressure on health-care workers and allow them to spend more time in quality human interactions, enhance direct patient care and reduce burnout.

We are facing a national shortage of health-care workers, overcrowding of emergency departments and lack of family doctors. Improving retention and recruitment is crucial in our province as the Saskatchewan auditor general foresees a shortage of 2,200 hard-to-recruit health-care workers in the next five years.

Virtual care technologies in combination with AI have the potential to shift hospital care to home-based care. Remote monitoring technologies that communicate with health-care hubs could facilitate patient followup, identifying and preventing life-threatening events and promote self care.

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A key barrier to tackle the huge surgical backlog precipitated by the pandemic is the lack of inpatient capacity; virtual care solutions augmented with AI could make home post-operative followup safe and effective.

More complex applications of AI such as clinical decision support, personalized medicine and real-time collaboration with clinicians are further into the future. The big challenge of using AI in health care is the integration into established health-care systems and into the workflow of health-care workers.

This will require a cultural shift, system-wide changes, and the development of trust in AI processes. The Hippocratic principle of “do no harm” must be applied to AI when used in patient care.

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The ethical application of AI to health care must ensure data security and confidentiality, monitoring the quality of data to avoid errors and bias that may lead to patient harm or inequities in health-care delivery.

A governance structure and the establishment of regulatory pathways that ensures validation of clinical applications and transparency of AI processes is also required.

AI will not replace health-care workers, but it has the realistic potential to facilitate the delivery of health care by performing routine, repetitive and administrative tasks that, according to some studies, can take up to 70 per cent of health-care workers’ time and refocus them into direct patient care.

The future of health care will be a hybrid system that combines in-person care with virtual care. The thoughtful and ethical incorporation of AI in health-care delivery could be transformative.

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AI may become an essential tool in our health-care armamentarium to improve the care we give to our patients, giving us the time to highlight the qualities that make us human.

Dr. Ivar Mendez is a professor of neurosurgery and director of the Virtual Care and Remote Presence Robotic Program at the University of Saskatchewan.