Artificial Intelligence (AI) has played a huge role in assisting physicians during the pandemic. Which may sound a little crazy at first, but if you think about it, actually makes a lot of sense.
One of the best ways to keep the disease from spreading, as we all know by now, is by limiting human-to-human contact… And what better way to do that then by utilizing AI?
Telehealth, for example, has been on the rise since the beginning of the pandemic, by being able to screen patients and create automatic notes for healthcare workers, allowing them to spend their time actually helping patients by reducing the paperwork load. It also helps to organize and analyze data so that the turn-around time is faster.
Healthcare centers are also using chatbots and virtual agents to pre-screen and allow patients to self-serve, thus freeing up physicians and nurses to help their patients.
Had this pandemic hit even a decade ago, a lot of this AI technology wouldn’t have been available. And it also begs the question as to whether hospitals and medical centers will keep this automation going in the future; this pandemic will surely change the lives of us living through it in many ways, some easily foreseeable, others less so. Only time will tell if AI will remain such a large part of health industry or not, but considering the effects on efficacy it’s pretty safe to guess that it will probably be here to stay.