Suki, a startup that makes an AI-powered voice assistant for doctors, received two pieces of news from major clients less than three weeks ago. The first was that they'd need the product to accommodate telemedicine visits. The second was that they'd need autofilled clinical notes to quickly process patients who test positive for COVID-19 -- "Hey, Suki, write up a completed clinical note for COVID-19." The clients sent Suki their requirements and the data they'd gathered so far, and CEO Punit Soni called a meeting with his COO, head of customer success, product lead, sales lead and marketing lead. The meeting lasted 20 minutes.

Advanced technologies have caused a significant impact on the development of the healthcare industry. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in particular, have allowed for significant breakthroughs in life science and healthcare research and treatments, whether that's automating critical but repetitive tasks to free up time for clinicians, through to automatic speech recognition for faster disease diagnosis, or the ability to create synthetic controls for clinical trials. But with 75 per cent of healthcare enterprises planning to execute an AI strategy next year, there's a far greater opportunity round the corner to further unleash its potential. Here, six experts from leading healthcare organisations including Brainomix, AiCure, HeartFlow, Cambridge Cognition, Oxford Brain Diagnostics and Zebra Medical Vision, share their views on what 2020 holds for the industry. "As highlighted earlier this year, the NHS aims to become a world leader in AI and machine learning in the next five years. In 2020, we expect to see this become more apparent in practical terms with, AI technologies becoming the predominant driving force behind imaging diagnostics. With around 780,000 people suffering a stroke each year in Europe, and 7.4 million people living with heart and circulatory diseases in the UK, it is imperative we find ways to reduce the burden on healthcare organisations and improve time to disease detection. The number of MRI and CT scans for example is already on the rise, and AI has the ability to read scans as accurately as an expert physician. Utilising these new technologies to review scans for any disease can reduce patient wait time and ease the burden on medical staff. There will be greater recognition next year of the value of AI in augmenting human performance."

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is one of the leading causes of death in the UK; it's responsible for more than 66,000 deaths each year, and it's estimated that 2.3 million people in the UK are currently living with the disease. Imaging is an important part of diagnosing people and managing treatment with a range of cardiovascular diseases, and the NHS uses Echo, MRI and CT scans to do this. A CT scan is used to do a coronary CT angiography, which involves taking images of the heart blood vessels and using the CT scan with some dye contrast into the blood vessels. This enables doctors to see if blood vessels are narrowing, causing patients to have chest pain or angina. The test has been around for the last 10 or 15 years but has increased in usage as radiation doses have decreased dramatically.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are happening at a much quicker pace than anyone could have predicted. This emerging technology is now being used by businesses and is even finding its way into consumer products. One industry that has fully embraced AI is healthcare and doctors and other hospital staff are using advanced machine learning algorithms to solve problems in new ways. TechRadar Pro spoke with HeartFlow's Founder and Chief Technology Officer Charles A. Taylor to learn more about how the company is using deep learning to build 3-D models of patients' hearts to provide doctors with a safer and more effective way of diagnosing cardiovascular disease. HeartFlow has pioneered technology to help clinicians diagnose coronary heart disease (CHD).

Healthcare is a world of perverse incentives. One person's waste is another person's annual bonus. If you have shares in Novo Nordisk, you don't really want people to eat more fruits and vegetables, because then sales of diabetes meds might drop. The same is true on a larger scale for hospital systems that get paid to conduct tests and perform surgeries instead of keeping people healthy. It doesn't pay--yet--to keep people healthy.