Early adopting providers such as Sharp Healthcare and UPMC have been keen on seeing how far they can push the complex but extraordinarily helpful technology today, knowing that AI will play a much bigger role in their organizations tomorrow. "Currently, very little artificial intelligence is being utilized across the healthcare sector overall," said Brett MacLaren, vice president of enterprise analytics at Sharp HealthCare. "At Sharp, we are using predictive algorithms to predict a patient's propensity to pay their bill, and are leveraging that insight to prioritize who to contact and negotiate with to increase their likelihood of payment." In addition, Sharp HealthCare recently completed a proof of concept to develop an algorithm to predict patient decline in the acute care setting by analyzing its electronic health record data to see when rapid response teams are called in to intervene on its sickest patients. "At this point, we have not quantified the additional value the predictive algorithm on a patient's propensity to pay has bill provided to our bottom line, but the consensus is that it has been worthwhile," MacLaren said.

Last September, Robert MacLaren, an ophthalmologist and professor at Oxford University, plunged a tiny robotic arm into Father William Beaver's eye. A membrane had recently contracted on the 70-year-old priest's retina, pinching it into an uneven shape and causing him to see the world as if reflected in a hall of mirrors. Using a joystick and a camera feed, MacLaren guided the arm of the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2 for short, through a tiny incision in the eye, before lifting the wrinkled membrane, no more than a hundredth of a millimeter thick, from the retina, and reversing Beaver's vision problems. It was the first operation performed inside the human eye using a robot. Since September, five more patients have undergone robot-assisted operations at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital in England, including one in which a virus, used in gene therapy to halt the effects of retinal degeneration, was planted on the retina itself, a procedure only made possible by R2D2's unprecedented precision.

A priest said he felt'completely relaxed' as surgeons performed revolutionary surgery inside his eye with the aid of a robot. The patient, Father William Beaver, 70, an associate priest at St Mary the Virgin Church in Oxford, said his eyesight was returning following the operation, having previously experienced distorted vision similar to'looking in a hall of mirrors at a fairground'. The procedure - the world's first robotic operation - was carried out by surgeons at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital, who welcomed its success and said it could revolutionise the way such conditions are treated. Father Beaver told BBC Breakfast: 'I was completely relaxed and completely comfortable because I could see that all the technology was in place and all the goodwill was in place and all the skills were in place. Professor Robert MacLaren says scientists'have just witnessed a vision of eye surgery in the future' 'Because, you see, the key is the precision.