Artificial intelligence has already created the initial impact for the healthcare knowledge base and it seems like its use is going to get increasingly more enhanced. Whether it be research or the clinical care or even management decision making AI has a role that is increasingly been understood. Artificial intelligence helps in making sense of large data and also to see trends as well as spot areas of potential improvement. When used with good understanding it helps ease the workload, improve the quality of care and also predict patient’s outcome, severity and flow of patients to the balancing of resources.
The areas of emergency care where artificial intelligence can help could be grouped into following;
- Triage and diagnosis.
- Imaging and diagnostics.
- Operational efficiency.
- Clinical decision support.
- Patient monitoring.
- Administrative tasks.
We can see very well that the artificial intelligence can be utilized in almost all the areas and through all the dimensions of work in the emergency department. To me the most important is accurate triage and diagnosis because that’s the bread and butter of emergency care and this is what the patient expect when they visit the emergency department. From the standpoint of the hospital having operational efficiency and completing the administrative tasks on time is very important because this is how they would know that the emergency department is best utilized with the resources made available to treat the patients. Clinical decision support is also important for the treating physicians so that whenever they get stuck in their decision making or in deciding the better treatment option uh this clinical support system helps them understand the dynamics of different treatments and the possible outcome of one over the other.
So if we talk about the benefit of artificial intelligence we can say and that different areas where the artificial intelligence ohh could provide benefit include the following;
- Smooth and accurate triaging.
- Left cumbersome footprint process.
- Improved patient outcome.
- Increase accuracy of diagnosis and management
We know that each improvement comes with its own challenges and this is not different for artificial intelligence also. We know that the privacy is of biggest concern whenever we talk about um the electronic based system. So the challenges can be bundled in following areas:
- Data privacy.
- Integration with existing systems
- Training and acceptance by the staff.
- Ethical considerations.
It is imperative upon all of us working in the emergency departments to use artificial intelligence for the advantage of our patients. This includes better and accurate triage, improved foot print process, improved patient outcome and at the same time maintaining the data privacy with ethical usage of artificial intelligence.