How Is Machine Learning Transforming Healthcare?

Updated on Apr 10th, 2024

ML in healthcare

Gone are the days when you have to wait in a long queue to get your doctor’s consultation. Today, machine learning in healthcare has become an important aspect for all those clinics and healthcare institutes that seek to enhance care delivery. 

Whether we talk about clinical decision support systems, custom telemedicine apps, or even healthcare fraud detection systems, machine learning applications in healthcare have become a vital aspect of the global market. Machine learning applications in healthcare combine millions of humans’ power to empower and reinvent core fields like medicine and diagnostics for better healthcare facilities. 

Do you still have doubts about the benefits of ML in healthcare? Don’t worry, we have got you covered! In today’s post, we will discover different ways in which machine learning is transforming the healthcare industry. 

From visual assistants to discovering new drugs, how machine learning in healthcare has become an important healthcare sector!

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Top 6 Ways in Which Machine Learning in Healthcare is Becoming a Global Trend

Here are the top 6 ways through which machine learning in healthcare is becoming a global trend. We hope you can get a clear picture of how to implement custom machine learning solutions in your healthcare institute.

1.  New Drug Discovery

One of the consistent and evergreen complaints about the healthcare industry is that there aren’t enough drugs to cure the world’s new-growing diseases. Many conspiracy theories believe that this results from pharmaceutical companies preferring to stick with current patents and sell off the old medicines in the market. 

However, the truth is that it costs billions to research and develop new and effective drugs for new and ever-growing diseases. Even for the treatment of a single disease, thousands of compounds and vaccines have to study. Many of them are then sent to the labs, and then, out of those, two or three are finalized.

Hence, all that is a complicated and tedious process for the healthcare industry. But, hopefully, machine learning will make the discovery of new drugs easier for pharma companies. Unlike human ways, a machine learning system learns from past activities and can quickly determine which compounds would best treat a specific disease. 

2. Better Diagnostic Tools

Another excellent use case of machine learning in healthcare is better diagnostic tools. Today, many leading hospitals use hi-tech environments and are run by expensive machines and the trained staff that know how to use them. machine-learning-for-medical-diagnostics-3The healthcare institutes today are no longer restricted from accessing the hi-tech healthcare tools for better diagnosis. Thanks to the growth of machine learning in healthcare, hospitals have now steadily shifted to a more automated environment where diagnoses can be made quickly and accurately. Here’s how machine learning in healthcare works! 

We all know that hospitals produce enormous data every year, a lot of which consists of medical images and other critical reports. Unfortunately, many of them don’t have the means to record and analyze all of this data. But, it can be analyzed with the help of a custom machine learning solution. The gathered insights from a machine learning solution could then be used to understand the human condition better. 

3. NLP For Customer Service

Today, all types of public health organizations are overwhelmed with more patients than ever before. Many of the leading ones were already prepared, but few were not ready for such a huge increase in patients. That’s where AI and ML in healthcare come to play!

With cloud-based AI and machine learning models, the hospitals and clinics could now answer all the patient’s queries without any delay. Moreover, with the help of RPA, many repetitive medical tasks could also be managed without any human assistance.

The ML technology even allows the healthcare institutes to optimize their approach to answering/prioritizing inquiries based on everything from the voice’s distress to the voice’s age. And while they’re smart, many of these APIs are engineered with privacy in mind. They don’t store private data, helping ensure patient confidentiality.

4. Virtual Assistants

A virtual machine is not a new term, but its growth in the healthcare sector is a completely new trend. Today, machine learning in healthcare is constantly helping the industry become more effective, eradicating the need for constant professional support and moving toward a future where a virtual assistant will ultimately provide help.Medical virtual-assistant-

Custom AI-based chatbots and ML-powered virtual assistants are actively being used by leading healthcare institutes and hospitals to provide efficient assistance to old, infirm, or living in far rural areas. These citizens use applications like telemedicine apps or doctor consultation software based on smart AI algorithms to connect to virtual health assistants known as Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA) or Medical Virtual Assistants (MVA). 

These smart assistants offer nearly the same level of care they would receive if they were sitting in the doctor’s office.

Hence, it can be said that machine learning in healthcare, at their core, creates a bridge between the patient and the doctor. The technology allows the former to receive help and give the letter a chance to provide that help without wasting their time making and keeping appointments.

5. To Find New Cure

With each passing year, we humans try to eliminate all the market’s major issues, but a new pandemic always makes our efforts in vain. That’s why new and advanced technology is needed that is capable enough to help us find and eliminate the new pandemic at a very early stage. Here comes machine learning in healthcare! 

Machine learning in healthcare helps the researchers find new cures, but it also helps to find out how the formulated drugs can cure the existing diseases.

One such leading example of this is Daniel Cohen. His pharma company Pharnext uses machine learning applications to analyze current medications’ effects and use them to create new treatments. The company believes that by drafting machine learning in healthcare, they could create more advanced combinations faster than ever before.

With this approach, it’s clear that machine learning is the future and makes huge advancements in the healthcare industry.

6. Patient Data Privacy

data-privacy Like every coin has two sides, the same can be said for machine learning in healthcare. One such aspect is patient data-privacy! Patient data has been a very critical concern for the healthcare industry for quite some now. The hackers access the patient’s information to raise the wrong claims or hack into their medical records and order irrelevant medicines. However, the scenario is very different today!

With the rise of machine learning in healthcare, organizations are better equipped to ensure patient data privacy. Like De-identification, many leading initiatives have been actively adopted by many leading healthcare institutes to protect the data and simultaneously make it useful for machine learning models. For instance, Google Cloud Healthcare API can detect sensitive data, such as protected health information (PHI), and mask, delete, or otherwise obscure it.

Conclusion

So, those were some of the ways through which machine learning in healthcare is gaining popularity. It is not to mention that this list is incomplete as change is the only constant in today’s digital world. So we need to know all the trends, but following some of them that are suitable for our agency/institute may prove beneficial both in terms of efficiency and cost-savings. 

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Do you have more questions? Whether you want to know more or looking for a reliable technology partner, we at Matellio are always here to help you. With our years-long experience and access to best-in-class technology tools, we ensure to make your digital transformation process the best in the market. Our certified healthcare experts can offer you healthcare technology consulting services and our engineers strive to deliver an error-free and cost-effective software solution/mobile app catering to all your needs. Reach us today to get all the information on machine learning services in your healthcare sector. Plus, avail your free consultation from our experts by clicking this link!

Till then, Happy Reading!

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