Pros and Cons of AI in Healthcare

The main buzzword in the last few years is, we all know it, AI. Artificial intelligence has basically found its way into any industry we can imagine, and one of them is, naturally, the healthcare industry. One of the most important ones for us as it’s our health in question, after all. So what are the pros and cons of AI in healthcare, and in which way can it help? In which cases may it not be so beneficial?

Just some of the benefits of AI are better and more precise diagnosis of diseases, personalisation of therapy and optimisation of work processes. But with artificial intelligence comes the ‘dehumanisation’ of the treatment process, high costs, the issue of patient data privacy, among others.

Let’s dive into this interesting topic together and see the pros and cons of AI in healthcare, an industry that’s considered a top priority for people’s health and wellbeing.

Pros of AI in Healthcare

A revolutionary and often jaw-dropping technology that has numerous advantages, including those in the healthcare industry. Let’s see what are the pros of AI in this sector.

Faster & More Precise Diagnostics

The results achieved by AI in the field of diagnostics are nothing short of astonishing. In the context of development that develops with the aim of medical imaging, we often encounter terms such as MRI, CT, X-ray, and so on. Precisely these medical imaging procedures with the help of AI can more easily recognise various abnormalities that occur on tissues.

How do they do it? For the development of a satisfactory degree of precision of AI-powered diagnostics, a strong dataset preparation and a quality database architecture are required. With the help of machine learning and deep learning models, it is possible to detect a tumour much earlier. And this greatly increases the chances for more successful treatment with a better outcome.

Personalised Access to Treatments

Have you heard of precision medicine? It is one of the new trends in healthcare, where there is a shift from a generic therapeutic approach to precision medicine. The key to precision medicine is the following. Information is collected about an individual’s medical history, family medical history, their lifestyle and habits, genetic predispositions — and all this is compared with a huge amount of previous cases.

This way, we get better insights for the patient and a personalised treatment plan is obtained. From a developer’s perspective, a stable data pipeline and integration with existing systems are of vital importance.

New Medications: Faster Discovery & Testing

It is a harsh reality we live in that investing in and developing new helpful drugs is an extremely expensive and long-term process. But with the help of artificial intelligence, more precisely by applying AI-powered analytical tools, testing can be much faster.

And that means faster discovery of new meds with the help of analysing a large number of datasets and the integration of high-performance computing solutions. The end result? AI helps shorten the time and cut down on financial requirements needed for clinical studies in the discovery of new life-saving drugs.

Work Process Optimisation

AI helps us all optimise work processes and workflows, including those in the healthcare sector. We also know how burdened doctors are with administration related to patients. That’s where AI steps into the game. As a software developer working in the AI field, this includes working on micro-service architecture, API integrations as well as security protocols.

Repetitive tasks can be optimised with the help of intelligent automation processes, and healthcare workers can spend much less time on paperwork and dedicate themselves more to what matters the most. The patients.

More Reliable Accessibility to Healthcare

Since we live in an AI-driven digital age, with all that came also medical virtual assistants and chatbots as a new trend and new approach in medicine to treating people. These are just examples of how modern medicine too, has gotten quite digitalised.

And although it cannot replace a doctor or nurse entirely (and that is that the end goal at all), it can be very useful in situations where medical staff is not able to be with the patient face to face. For example, there are many elderly and ill people who live in remote and rural areas. And to whom this type of medical help means more than a lot.

When it comes to developing such AI-powered solutions, it’s essential to create simple user interfaces. We’ve already mentioned the elderly who do need a simple and straightforward user experience. What’s also needed is the compatibility with various operating systems, and most importantly — complete and secure protection of personal data.

Cons of AI in Healthcare

Nothing is black and white, so there are both pros and cons of AI in healthcare. Let’s see where AI has areas for improvement.

Concerns About Privacy & Data Security

When we talk about the pros and cons of AI in healthcare, we cannot fail to mention data privacy. People are rightfully worried when this topic is mentioned, because data breaches often happen in other sectors, e.g. in banks. An individual’s health data is, after all, the most intimate and private thing that a person has. That is why it is very important to comply with the US-based Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA, or the EU-based GDPR regulation, which covers a wider area than the health sector in relation to HIPAA. However, the fact remains that incidents such as data leaks can permanently damage trust, as well as lead to various legal and financial consequences.

Loss of Human Touch

We mentioned how digital solutions like medical virtual assistants and chatbots can help people in many ways. But let’s face it, we all often get irritated by the way many chatbots we use on a day-to-day basis ‘talk’ to us. That is why, when developing AI-powered solutions, it’s very important to ensure a user journey of top-quality. Why? After all, it is our health, that we are all most sensitive about.

So, there is a justified suspiciousness of people regarding this type of treatment when there’s no personal, human contact by a medical professional. And this represents one of the biggest challenges in treatment supported by artificial intelligence. Do we want to talk to an automated bot after receiving a difficult diagnosis, or is live contact with a physician more important? You be the judge.

AI Models’ Bias Probability

AI algorithms are not just sets of instructions and rules that have come about by themselves. They simply learn from existing datasets. As a disadvantage of AI in this regard, there are risks where algorithms do not have sufficiently representative samples, and therefore can lead to wrong diagnoses and treatment recommendations. Something similar to when ChatGPT hallucinates, but this is where we’re talking about human lives. Something much more serious.

High Implementation Costs

High-performance servers. GPU clusters. Various framework licences. All these expensive necessities when it comes to AI-powered medical solutions can be a disadvantage of AI in healthcare. Not all healthcare systems have the resources to finances such investments, and eventually can lag behind other larger systems that did have enough financial resources to invest into AI. Also, a continuous education of employees in this field is more than needed in this fast-evolving industry.

Legal & Ethical Constraints

This tricky area has not yet been explored, given that AI is still at its early stage. However, when it comes to regulating liability in the event of, for example, an incorrect diagnosis, who is to blame? A human? An AI-powered software solution? Here, regulation is still trying to define responsibilities. Also, from a developer perspective, we are often exposed to the creation of software for which, as we have already mentioned, there are no clearly defined legal regulations.

Conclusion

To sum it up, we can say that we’re only at the beginning of discovering the possibilities of AI in every aspect imaginable. When it comes to advantages and disadvantages of AI in healthcare specifically, we see that each coin has two sides. However, it is clear that, despite all the challenges and questions AI brings along, it is still a greatly unexplored area that’ll bring us many more discoveries and make our lives easier in practically every domain of our lives.

Healthcare is one of the most important industries for the human species and we will certainly see many investments in it to see how artificial intelligence can further help in treating and preserving health. From faster illness diagnoses, personalised therapy and treatments to overall optimisation of the entire process, AI is here to facilitate and improve medical treatment from every angle.

As a software development company with experience and skilled teams in the AI field, we are here to help you build AI-powered software that can be revolutionary in various industries, including healthcare. Feel free to reach out and set up a meeting with us by clicking the button below!