In addition to increasing the purposes of AI in healthcare – from medical choice help to personalised medication, hospitals in India look to check and undertake different kinds of rising applied sciences this 12 months.
Prashant Singh, CIO of Max Hospitals, and JP Dwivedi, CIO of Rajiv Gandhi Most cancers Institute, mentioned with Healthcare IT Information some persevering with and rising traits in well being IT this 2024.
For one, robotic options for surgical procedures are anticipated to take extra space, not simply in huge, non-public chains but in addition in smaller, public hospitals as prices turn into extra aggressive with the arrival of home alternate options.
A specific type of AI, generative AI, which grew in reputation final 12 months, will keep in demand as hospitals search extra environment friendly instruments to spend extra time with their sufferers than doing menial administrative work.
Whereas there’s sustained enthusiasm amongst hospitals to be deemed as “expertise champions,” investing in new applied sciences shouldn’t be met with out resistance.
Q: Which pattern in well being expertise in India do you see persevering with in 2024? How about new traits to anticipate within the new 12 months?
Dwivedi, Rajiv Gandhi Most cancers Institute: Hospitals have all the time embraced medtech. In Radiology, there are digital X-rays, filmless photos, high-precision CT, MRI, and PET-CT. Haematology and Biochemistry laboratories have analysers, which are actually built-in into Hospital Info Techniques. Automation has additionally come to Microbiology and Histopathology, whereas hospital investments in molecular laboratories and genome sequencing have grown lately. Now we’re going for AI in each Radiology and Pathology; 2024 will see the continuation of this pattern.
With the emergence of increasingly refined modalities in Radiology and heavy demand for radiologists, it’s crucial that we do some type of triage to separate completely regular photos from the photographs that want specific consideration of an expert. Using AI/ML has already enabled that. We see quite a lot of AI/ML-enabled merchandise studying the artwork of analysis alongside radiologists. After studying the evaluation of 100-200 regular photos and 100-200 irregular photos, the software program can step in to kind these photos and current solely irregular or doubtlessly irregular photos to the radiologist. It saves important effort and time. AI can also be in a position to detect nodules that aren’t seen via the bare eye and recommend a more in-depth look by an expert, and thus keep away from a false destructive. In Pathology, high-precision cameras allow the [preservation of] digital photos reasonably than glass slides which might be very troublesome to deal with, retailer, and transport. These photos could possibly be saved digitally and analysed by AI/ML-enabled merchandise in the identical method in radiology imaging.
In our institute, we now have been engaged on digital pathology and using AI/ML-enabled expertise [tools] in detecting prostate most cancers. The outcomes thus far have been very encouraging. We’ll quickly broaden it to detect many different kinds of most cancers. The subsequent expertise intervention space is placing it to therapeutic use.
Robotic Surgical procedure has been in existence for greater than a decade and is confirmed to forestall blood loss, enhance the precision of surgical procedure, and minimise the size of hospital keep. Till very just lately, such robots have been very costly and coaching was out there solely in a choose few locations within the West. With the arrival of a home robotic known as SSI Mantra, the price has been considerably decreased. We’ll see increasingly robotic options coming within the close to future.
Different examples of expertise interventions are Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA), Trans Arterial Chemo Embolization (TACE), Trans Arterial Radiation Embolization (TARE) and Excessive-Depth Centered Ultrasound (HIFU). All these have been successfully utilized in oncology over the previous few years to enhance precision and minimise intervention. We will witness the fast enlargement of those applied sciences in healthcare in 2024 and a few years to return.
Other than a number of giant hospital chains, hospitals historically have been myopic about utilizing IT till 2020 when COVID-19 struck. The onslaught of COVID-19 modified the mindset of healthcare suppliers in some ways. For the primary time, docs most popular offering opinions remotely (telemedicine) and utilizing computer systems to test affected person data (EHR) greater than referring to paper information that might carry the lethal COVID-19 virus. This pattern continued thereafter as sufferers are in a position to e book appointments and see their full medical historical past utilizing apps, whereas docs are discovering it simple to view medical historical past on a single display screen reasonably than flipping via a number of pages of a cumbersome paper file.
Nevertheless, there are a number of challenges within the adoption of EHR, and these are confronted by clinicians worldwide. Medical doctors discover it helpful to retrieve the data however usually are not snug coming into the notes, orders, and prescriptions on-line. Hospitals are in search of reliable applied sciences that may assist in the creation of medical data within the background whereas docs are interacting with and inspecting their sufferers. The subsequent greatest could possibly be handwriting or voice recognition applied sciences. Numerous guarantees are coming however nothing has been efficiently confirmed apart from a number of particular areas like dictating radiology and pathology stories. This downside is extra acute when a physician is making rounds and is made to remain within the ward to enter progress notes, prescriptions, and diagnostic orders on the pc. The 12 months 2024 will see some promise on this path.
As increasingly affected person knowledge is changing into out there on-line, the information safety threat has elevated manifold. Cybersecurity expertise is rising and can see a marked enchancment in 2024 and past.
Singh, Max Hospitals: In my opinion, AI/gen AI will proceed in 2024 in varied healthcare use circumstances, particularly case summarisation and illness prediction.
Q: How receptive are hospitals in India to new applied sciences being provided out there? Are you seeing hospital budgets aligned to testing/introducing new applied sciences in 2024?
Dwivedi, Rajiv Gandhi Most cancers Institute: Hospitals have all the time been receptive to medical applied sciences however are actually opening as much as IT as effectively. Governments are encouraging [the] use of IT in hospitals in some ways. Sufferers are additionally conscious of the advantages of affected person well being data, telemedicine, on-line appointments and lots of different amenities [that] opened up with the assistance of IT, and they’re able to differentiate technologically superior hospitals from others. Know-how can also be serving to [improve] affected person security, decreasing price, and enhancing affected person expertise. Hospital budgets are getting aligned with not solely testing however placing these applied sciences to efficient use and so they wish to mission themselves as expertise champions reasonably than being stamped as laggards.
Singh, Max Hospitals: Company/larger hospitals are very a lot receptive to newer applied sciences however the allocation of ample finances nonetheless faces some resistance even now.
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The interviewees’ solutions have been edited for brevity and readability.