Nowadays, the healthcare sector is changing at a rapid pace. What once was a conventional industry that worked around many rounds of contact between doctor and patient almost always led to a shallow positive feeling that telemedicine has made the relationship between the doctor-patient real-time and without geographical constraints. A while back, we discussed the healthcare developments that would govern 2018, and now that we are getting ready to start a new year, it is only fitting that we look at where technology is going for the healthcare industry. Let us look at top healthcare trends for 2020 and beyond without further delay. AI is altering our view on the delivery of modern-day Healthcare.

We see the most promising applications in healthcare when real time decision making using simple data sets can relieve the burden on the caregiver and drive better outcomes for patients. For example, alarm fatigue in hospitals - both clinically and operationally - is a cause of lost productivity and decreased patient safety. AI technology can be applied to a smart pump to only sound an alarm when there is a critical need for intervention and to initiate an escalation process if there is no response. Trend: Digitization through the electronic health record brings a patient's entire clinical history to one place through notes, observations, lab results, imaging and other data. There is a risk that digitization creates only copies of the old analog data sets - electronic records without analytics and interoperability are just expensive paper.

Can AI solve the big problems confronting healthcare? Healthcare is a personal experience that's intrinsically part of our shared human experience. Even healthy people at some point see a doctor of some sort, get vaccinated for school or travel, be prescribed medicines, undergo tests, maybe even get stitches or surgery. Small wonder, healthcare is the fastest growing sector in our economy. Access to care, and the quest for preventative care and to cure the currently uncurable conditions that affect 40% of Americans are among the biggest problems facing medicine and the society it serves. Technology in healthcare as in other user sectors has always been a R&D enabler helping researchers to work faster and collaborate better.