Healthcare and the artificial intelligence revolution - PMLiVE

The healthcare sector has always embraced technology. Since the advent of the computer, technologists and healthcare professionals have been working together to exploit technological breakthroughs so that they might improve patient outcomes while also minimising costs and delivering high standards of care to a greater number of patients. When a technology becomes reliable, cost-effective and scalable, it is embraced and generally thrives. We saw this in the '70s with the adoption of mainframe computers, in the '80s with the widespread adoption of personal computers and local networking, in the '90s with internet-based systems and more recently with the adoption of mobile technologies. It appears now we are on the cusp of the next technological revolution within healthcare, combining the vast amounts of data available, cloud computing services and machine learning techniques in order to create artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions that can provide expert insight and analysis on a mass scale, at a relatively low cost.