Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I am a proud late adopter of new technology. I had a StarTAC well into the 21st century, fearing the limitless access to digital information and services that smartphones would bring and the way they would rob us of our time and attention and humanity. Though this realization offers little solace as I stare into my phone hundreds of hours a day.) I traveled with my books of CDs and my Discman well into the era when Transportation Security Administration agents would look at them with curiosity and suspicion.

While a hot topic of late, it is easy to forget that the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) is not new. Early philosophers and mathematicians theorized that mechanical reasoning could one day be taught to robots, automatons, and smart machines. However, AI advancements slowed over the next few decades due to competing funding priorities, moral/ethical concerns, and the limitations of computing technology and data storage. It was not until the late 1990s/early 2000s that most of these challenges and concerns were alleviated and computer and data technologies advanced, becoming more affordable. Today, significant investment can be seen in health care-related AI with well-known companies like Microsoft, Google, and IBM heavily involved in promoting AI solutions in eye care,and smaller startups even attaining FDA-approval as standalone diagnostic technology.2-6

After years of stagnation and inadequate innovations, the call for care that is higher quality and more accessible and that costs less is beginning to be answered. We're starting to see incremental progress toward meaningful healthcare technology and reimagined delivery models. New developments in digital medicine, DIY care and AI are emerging, with the potential to advance the industry in ways that previous attempts have failed. Despite signs of progress, doctor's office wait times continue to rise. Middle- and low-income patients are in critical need of more affordable primary and specialty care.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning will play an even bigger role in healthcare in 2020 than they did in 2019, helping medical professionals with everything from oncology screenings to note-taking. On top of actual deployments, increased investment activity is also expected this year, and with deeper deployments of AI and ML technology, a broader base of test cases will be available to collect valuable best practices information. As AI is implemented more widely in real-world clinical practice, there will be more academic reports on the clinical benefits that have arisen from the real-world use, said Pete Durlach, senior vice president for healthcare strategy and new business development at Nuance. "With healthy clinical evidence, we'll see AI become more mainstream in various clinical settings, creating a positive feedback loop of more evidence-based research and use in the field," he explained. "Soon, it will be hard to imagine a doctor's visit, or a hospital stay that doesn't incorporate AI in numerous ways."

A surge of new healthcare products from wearable consumer health trackers to diagnostic algorithms promising to improve medical outcomes and costs with artificial intelligence (AI) is prompting physicians and hospital executives to ask a fundamental question: "Are these technologies solving the right problems?" Two ongoing developments add scale and urgency to this important question. The first is a virtual gold rush of technology vendors looking to stake a claim in the healthcare IT market, which is projected to top $390 billion by 2024 according to research firm MarketsandMarkets. The second is what the World Medical Association is calling a "pandemic of physician burnout," caused by a staggering workload of electronic paperwork to document patient care and which is required for insurance coverage, financial reimbursement, and medicolegal liability protection. More than half of clinicians report feeling burned out from the hamster wheel of documentation and reporting tasks that often require spending two hours at a computer for every hour spent in patient care.

Labor unions have been around since the mid-19th century, and they've helped many a teacher, government employee, electrical worker, and others gain fairer pay or better working conditions. Unions give workers a chance to dictate their own terms and present a united front, ideally leaving everyone better off (though parents whose kids can't go to school for days at a time due to teacher's strikes might disagree). But one profession that unionization has eluded is medicine. Dr. Eric Topol is the co-host of popular podcast Medicine and the Machine, editor in chief of medical news and education website Medscape, and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. In his opinion, the lack of a functioning union for doctors has detracted both from the satisfaction physicians get from their jobs, and the quality of care their patients receive.

Artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare providers is currently at the peak of inflated expectations, according to Gartner's recently published "Hype Cycle for Healthcare Providers, 2019." This is not a surprising conclusion, given the industry's ongoing claims about disruptive AI-based solutions that will transform healthcare. When you start reading about how "ambient AI" is going to see and hear everything that is going on in an exam room and somehow magically convert that to usable data for analytics and machine learning, you should be very skeptical. This misplaced dream of an all-knowing, all-seeing machine is holding developers back from addressing the real problem: giving clinicians tools they can use at the point of care today. Before we defer to Dr. Alexa for all our healthcare needs, let's first consider what type of AI innovations have the potential to improve healthcare efficiencies -- and which functions don't address what's really broken in healthcare.

Imagine a visit to your doctor's office in which your physician asks you how you've been feeling, whether your medication is working or if the shoulder pain from an old fall is still bothering you -- and his or her focus is entirely on you and that conversation. The doctor is looking at you, not at a computer screen. He or she isn't moving a mouse around hunting for an old record or pecking on the keyboard to enter a diagnosis code. This sounds like an ideal scenario, but as most people know from their own visits to the doctor, it's far from the norm today. But experts say that in an exam room of the future enhanced by artificial intelligence, the doctor would be able to call up a lab result or prescribe a new medicine with a simple voice command.

Kali Durgampudi, VP of Innovation, Mobile Architecture, R&D, Healthcare Solutions, Nuance Communications, Kali currently serves as the vice president of Innovation, Mobile Architecture, R&D – Healthcare Solutions, Nuance Communications where he o... The abundance of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and connected technologies being introduced daily are pushing the limits of innovation and raising expectations with every passing day. Thanks to these developments, particularly in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), we have already seen some successes in autonomous cars, smart cities and manufacturing that we used to believe could only happen in our Jetsons fantasies. These innovations are also impacting the healthcare industry. While nurses and physicians will never be replaced by "Rosie" in the patient exam room, machine learning and AI are poised to transform the healthcare industry in ways that positively impact physicians and their patients. It's been well-established that physicians today spend too much time on administrative tasks, particularly documentation, even with the advent of electronic health records (EHRs).

"Siri, where is the nearest Starbucks?" "Suki, let's get Mr. Jones a two-week run of clarithromycin and schedule him back here for a follow-up in two weeks." Doesn't sound that crazy, does it? For years, voice assistants have been changing the way people shop, get around, and manage their home entertainment systems. Now they're starting to show up someplace even a little more personal: the doctor's office.