Many people think of artificial intelligence (AI) as futuristic technology, but in reality, it is already here, transforming the business of acute patient care. Currently, AI is used in a swathe of medical disciplines, ranging from cardiology to neurology, radiology, and oncology, with the potential for infinitely more applications in the future.
In addition to helping diagnose conditions and transforming hospital administration, AI has the power to radically improve acute patient care. It gives clinicians access to actionable data, enabling efficient decision-making by generating smart predictions of acute events. With the use of AI, healthcare technology can “learn” to see the patterns that precede acute events based on a vast collection of patient data.
AI’s predictive power offers physicians the opportunity to predict exacerbations and complications in chronic care, drastically improve patient compliance, and help make better clinical decisions. The result? Patients and doctors alike experience better outcomes, including cost-savings and improved quality of life.
How AI Supports Continuous Care
Through the use of modern digital wearable technology, AI can collect specific and personalized data about a patient’s health status as a natural extension of medical monitoring. Using AI, predictive algorithms can be applied to this data to predict exacerbations of chronic conditions and medical emergencies before they begin. Yet, many medical professionals fear that AI will replace their staff.
Put simply, this is untrue. Instead of replacing personnel, AI enhances the traditional one-way model of care delivery—the patient comes into the office and the physician collects their data—by creating a feedback loop with a constant flow of relevant information about the patient’s health. Physicians can use this data to fill the gaps in clinical knowledge associated with traditional patient monitoring. This enables faster, more accurate clinical decision-making by healthcare professionals, allowing for improved long-term outcomes in acute care without replacing the role of real people.
The power of AI is an especially important development in the care of chronic disease patients, who represent a significant proportion of the workload in a typical primary care office and who often have the highest risks of acute medical emergencies. In primary care, the care of chronic disease patients can take as long as 10.6 hours per day. However, the time spent keeping chronic disease patients out of the hospital can be drastically reduced with the use of continuous remote monitoring powered by AI technologies, which can improve patient compliance and predict acute events before they begin.
In particular, AI’s predictive power makes it better at predicting and preventing acute events than the traditional continuous monitoring model. It allows clinical decision-making to be based on larger, more actionable sets of patient data, rather than snapshots collected during regular appointments. This results in better outcomes for patients, including less time spent in the hospital. For obvious reasons, keeping chronic disease patients out of the hospital is a desirable outcome for doctors and patients alike: it reduces the labor, costs, and administrative burden associated with the care of chronic disease patients and improves patient quality of life over time.
Improving Patient Compliance with AI
One of the most promising ways in which AI is transforming acute patient care (without replacing the role of healthcare staff) is by enhancing patient engagement and compliance. According to the WHO, patient nonadherence is a “continuous and dynamic process,” one that can make the difference between disease progression or hospitalization and better patient care and safety.
Patient participation is often viewed as the final obstacle between poor and effective health outcomes, and physicians know that an effective plan of care is nothing without it. But traditional patient monitoring is anything but continuous or dynamic: it depends on a one-way flow of information that rarely engages the patient in their care and makes clinical decisions based on limited snippets of patient data.
AI significantly improves patient compliance by overcoming the hurdle of behavior change. Human behavior accounts for 40% of premature, preventable deaths due to heart disease, cancer, and stroke and is especially important in the care of chronic disease patients. Unfortunately, we also know that behavior change is one of the most challenging undertakings that we can commit to as human beings. As a result, 70% of clinical leaders say that less than half of their patients are highly engaged in their care.
Studies show that behavior change is most effective when individuals are self-motivated, but a challenge for healthcare professionals is helping patients find the motivation and opportunities to be engaged in their care. AI fills that need by creating opportunities to individualize continuous remote monitoring. By personalizing patient care and encouraging patient participation through the use of at-home digital wearable technology, AI has the power to improve engagement and follow-up rates, thereby improving patient health outcomes.
Improved patient compliance has benefits for physicians and their patients. It betters patients’ quality of life, keeps them out of the hospital, and reduces the time, labor, and financial burdens associated with the care and management of chronic disease. In other words, when AI transforms the business of acute patient care, everybody wins.
Here at Oxitone, we boost value-based healthcare by delivering extraordinary patient, clinical, and economical outcomes at reduced medical utilization and cost. Patients need a prompt response to emergencies. Physicians need an easy and timely follow-up with patients. Our mission is to transform chronic disease management and help save lives worldwide.
Let’s save lives together! To see how we help remote patient monitoring companies and physicians improve the management and care of high-risk patients, contact us today!