Experts say generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionise healthcare as a whole. It has the potential to improve patient care, reduce costs and make healthcare more accessible to everyone.

Speaking at a webinar on harnessing Generative AI in healthcare yesterday, Jaya Plmanabhan, Chief Scientist at Newfire Global, says generative Ai will change the way healthcare is delivered to patients.  

“Generative AI is currently being used to develop personalised treatment plans by analysing patients’ medical history, symptoms and other types of data to identify patterns and trends.

This information can then be used to develop a treatment plan that is tailored to individuals’ patient needs. It can be used to identify patients who are at risk of certain types of conditions, and also recommend treatment plans that are shown to be effective for patients with similar symptoms”, he says.

AI can deliver personalised healthcare

It’s also being used to improve the accuracy of how diseases are diagnosed. Healthcare can seem quite impersonal, and AI can change this. It can create personalised patient experiences by generating educational content through chatbots and other interactive tools that are tailored to each patients’ individual needs to improve the delivery of care.

“However it’s not the silver bullet and there are definite risks associated with it”, warns  Plmanabhan. “If it’s used to create fake medical images for data it could lead to misdiagnosis and other types of problems.” 

“It’s important to be aware of these risks and take steps to mitigate them. Generative AI should be used to augment human decision making rather than replace it entirely. Healthcare professionals should maintain an essential role in the decision making process and leverage Generative AI as a tool to enhance their expertise”, he says. 

Plmanabhan believes patients should have the opportunity to have informed consent and have a clear understanding of how generative AI is being utilised to support their healthcare journey. 

Can AI reduce health inequity?

Ruan Viljoen, Chief Technology Officer at BroadReach Group, is confident that AI can reduce health inequity. 

“The reality is we live in a world today where access to good healthcare is not equal and depending on your race, age, sex or location, you can have a very different healthcare experience from your neighbour even across the road or across the country”, he says.

“What I’m most excited about is the potential of generative AI as a technology to help us close some of these health equity gaps that we’ve been working on for many decades.” 

In many areas, there’s a low ratio of healthcare workers to patients. This means frontline healthcare workers are overburdened and cannot attend to all their patients’ needs.  BroadReach has identified what’s stealing their time, and what tasks are repetitive.

“Quite often you find that these are administrative burdens and that’s where we can apply Generative AI. The goal is not to replace the role but to free up the role of the individual to do value-adding work such as spending more time with patients and seeing more patients in a day.

We can deploy generative AI to help healthcare workers understand what is the next best action. What can they do on a day-to-day basis that will drive improvement?”, explains Viljoen. 

“AI is not about replacing human effort, but rather bringing human and artificial intelligence together to provide a better level of health services”.

Guidelines and policies

“There is a perception that there are no regulations in place at the moment but in reality we are not starting from scratch”, says Vedantha Singh, AI ethics and healthcare researcher from the University of Cape Town. 

“A number of regulatory authorities and even watchdog organisations have initiated policies and guidelines that govern the use of AI and we can apply it to generative AI.”

In Africa, a few countries have already developed AI policies. Egypt has a clear emphasis on ensuring that human labour is not completely replaced by AI driven innovation.  

Rwanda developed a policy around AI companies needing to ensure the technology is used to empower citizens and to empower means to give citizens agency over their personal data and how that data is going to be used. 

Although no such formal policy around AI and healthcare exists in South Africa, there are some guidelines in place such as those published in the policy action network around the use of AI and data in healthcare. 

“There are also a number of key policies embedded within our constitution that we can draw from and these guard rails have been embedded into the national digital health strategy which seeks to use digital health technologies to augment and not replace existing systems”, says Singh.

This policy acknowledges the need to skill and upskill healthcare workers to empower them to use digital technologies.  “In the case of generative AI, one of the key skills that we would hope healthcare workers develop would be the skill of critically evaluating information”, she says.

Another important policy is the National Health Act, which stipulates the protection of patient confidentiality and health information.

“We therefore have this unique opportunity to develop our own policies to ensure that these ethical issues are taken into account from inception to deployment”- Health-e News