What is The Potential Of Generative AI in Healthcare

What This Analysis Does—and Does Not—Cover

To deploy this approach to healthcare, let’s be clear that we aren’t talking about other forms of deep learning, like the digital interpretation of medical images or assessment of population health datasets. Those uses are already well underway. Nor are we looking at simple applications of task-specific AI such as scheduling appointments. This article focuses on generative AI, and in healthcare that is quite new.

Where Generative AI’s Core Capabilities Match Healthcare Needs

Second, what big areas do these problems correspond to? For example, with those four domains we have examples like:

a) Interpreting unstructured data: summarizing key facts in physician notes in an Electronic Health Record, asking health insurance companies for prior authorization of treatment, and seeking patterns in clinical trial data (e.g., in Patient Reported Outcomes or among non-responders to therapy).

b) Explaining data in a coherent way: customer service for health insurers, providing diagnoses, and generating treatment plans.

c) Engaging people in conversation: obtaining screening data (e.g., “do you feel safe at home?”) and providing talk therapy for low-acuity behavioral health issues.

d) Generating new ideas: working with datasets on proteomics and genomics to discover new drugs and new ways to use existing therapies.

Triggers and Obstacles to Adoption in Healthcare

Third, what are the triggers and obstacles to adopting the new technology? This question will quickly reduce the likelihood of certain use cases in the near future. For example, until companies go the route of gaining FDA approval of generative AI as a medical device that can provide advice on specific courses of action, AI is not going to be providing definitive diagnoses or creating treatment plans for American patients. There are many other obstacles, too, as Watson Health discovered.

However, the outlook may be different in emerging markets where clinicians are overwhelmed by patient demand and regulatory requirements are less strict. This analysis can also point to areas that fit the pattern of rapid innovation adoption—few dependencies, high need, and low risk or switching cost. That would include self-paid talk therapy, for instance.

How Business Dynamics Shape Early Market Entry

Fourth, what do business dynamics indicate about which markets will be entered first? The complexities of that question aren’t well suited to an article-length piece, but the answer would comprise factors such as unit and scale economics, channels to market, the sales process, and competitive intensity.