A new report on generative artificial intelligence from research and consulting firm Accenture outlines how advances in big language AI models — the technology that powers applications like ChatGPT — could change the future of healthcare.
According to Report, the positive impact of generative AI on human creativity and productivity will be massive:
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98% of healthcare providers and 89% of healthcare service executives agree that advances in generative AI are ushering in a new era of enterprise intelligence.
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40% of total working hours in healthcare could be supported or augmented by language-based AI.
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Half of healthcare organizations plan to use ChatGPT for learning purposes, and more than half are planning pilot cases this year.
To dig into this new research and explore further On the explosive topic of generative AI, we interviewed Rich Birhanzel, Accenture’s Global Health Industry Head.
> So what’s the big picture? How can development happen in language based AI? The Technology Behind ChatGPT – Change the Future of Healthcare?
One. ChatGPT’s tremendous growth has brought the world’s attention to the power of generative AI to enhance human potential. This technology has a huge opportunity to transform everything from science to business and beyond, powering the creativity and productivity of people across industries – but the opportunity in healthcare is significant.
Generative AI, consisting of trained large language models (LLMs) that generate answers to specific natural language questions, can perform tasks such as text classification, translation, summarization, and question answering.
Trained on a vast amount of literature, LLMs can learn and understand the patterns and relationships between words and sentences, and their meaning in context. Not only have they cracked the code on the complexity of language, enabling machines to learn context, infer intent and be independently creative, they can also be quickly fine-tuned for a wide range of different tasks.
The biggest potential for generative AI in healthcare right now is to free up scarce clinical resources from many administrative tasks so they can work on top of their licenses. A strong digital core and investment in people will be the key to realizing the full value of generative AI in a responsible and authentic way.
Organizations need to recognize that in order to reap the full benefits of generative AI, they will need to repurpose tasks that humans do. Generative AI will take over some tasks, but not all tasks. Those jobs, in turn, are split up, and there needs to be a way for people to redeploy that time to generate benefits for themselves, their organizations, and society.
The key to unlocking value is understanding how to reconcile technology with humans doing the work.
Q. Your report says that half of healthcare organizations plan to use ChatGPT for learning purposes, and more than half are planning pilot cases this year. What caution would you give to these organizations when jumping on ChatGPT so quickly?
One. People need to be given top priority. Generative AI applications in healthcare will rely on people to guide them based on human experience, perception and expertise. This means that organizations that focus on training people to work with generative AI will have a significant advantage.
AleEider will invest more in advancing the skills and capabilities of the organization rather than in technology. For example, we can expect people to take on a significant number of new tasks, such as ensuring accurate and responsible use of generative AI systems.
Helping people – both physicians and patients – keep up with technology-driven change will be the biggest factor in leveraging generative AI to create greater access, better experiences and better outcomes.
Organizations also need to create their own proprietary data. Foundation models for generative AI require large amounts of curated data to learn, which means organizations need to take a strategic and disciplined approach to acquiring, refining, securing, and deploying data.
Fine-tuning large language models pre-trained with organization-specific data will allow for more accurate use. Organizations need a modern enterprise data platform built on the cloud with a reliable set of data products.
Finally, there will be an urgent need to assess risks in the experimentation phase and create controls to embed responsible AI principles and approaches throughout the organization. The pace of technology development and adoption requires organizations to pay attention to any legal, ethical and reputational risks they may pose.
Q. According to your new report, 98% of healthcare provider executives agree that advances in generative AI are ushering in a new era of enterprise intelligence. What does this mean for healthcare provider organization C-suite executives and other health IT leaders in providers?
One. It is clear from our survey that healthcare executives agree that the positive impact of generative AI on human creativity and productivity will be massive. Our customers are already starting to see what general AI can do to help their organizations improve healthcare access, experience and outcomes.
Generative AI can help health care providers streamline the process of patient services while improving patient education by automating many manual and time-consuming tasks.
One of the near-term opportunities for this technology to transform health care is its ability to replace the need for proactive documentation and reporting that is performed today by both physicians and nurses alike.
Instead of a nurse or doctor recording information – from vitals to treatment plans – general AI can listen to conversations during the appointment and create a summary that can be added to an electronic health record. In addition, the technology can also simplify complex medical language into summaries that patients can understand, and that can be easily translated into any language.
We are working with customers in the near term to focus on discovery, experimentation and implementation on generative AI adoption. The industry is optimistic about the potential for generative AI to fundamentally change the way things work in healthcare, but also realistic about the challenges that come with rethinking the way organizations operate.
Q. Your report says that 40% of all working hours in healthcare could be supported or augmented by language-based AI. Please elaborate.
One. Organizations will use generative AI to change the way they work. Every role has the potential to be reinvented. Humans working with an AI co-pilot that can dramatically increase what people can do will become the norm. Generative AI will affect tasks in many ways – some will be automated, some will be transformed through AI assistance, and some will not be affected at all.
Healthcare organizations are already in dire need of fundamentally rethinking how work is done. global The physician shortage is getting worse – healthcare workers are overburdened and organizations can’t hire or train their way out of this situation – they need it through the combined power of technology and human ingenuity. There needs to be a rethink of how care is delivered.
Generative AI can create value by improving the efficiency, quality and performance of the workforce, allowing physicians to spend less time documenting and spend more time with patients. Organizations that take steps now to decompose tasks into tasks and invest in training people to do different jobs alongside machines will have a huge leg up on less imaginative competitors.
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