Although the Covid-19 pandemic has subsided, healthcare organizations continue to face challenges related to workflow and resource constraints, particularly affecting women’s health.
Can AI Really Close the Gap in Women’s Healthcare?
Specialties such as breast radiology and cytology are experiencing major backlogs, resulting in delays in timely diagnosis and treatment.
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising solution to these challenges. For over a decade, AI has been making strides in healthcare, offering innovative alternative ways to improve patient outcomes when all else fails.
As AI technology advances, it shows great potential in improving detection capabilities, reducing backlogs, and streamlining workflows. This, in turn, could significantly improve access to preventive care for women, which plays a critical role in advancing women’s health globally.
We are literally on the cusp of unprecedented technological change, with AI set to revolutionize various industries.
image by LiliGraphie
How can AI tools be integrated into healthcare?
AI involves programming machines to mimic human cognitive functions, enabling them to recognize patterns, make predictions, and even generate new content such as text, images, audio, and video. Generative AI (GenAI), a subset of AI, excels at creating new content based on learned data patterns.
The integration of AI across industries is transforming business operations, increasing efficiency, and driving much-needed reorganization. The impact on healthcare is particularly significant, with the potential to redefine many aspects of the industry. By addressing long-standing gaps and disparities, AI is likely to play a critical role in improving women’s healthcare, ensuring timely and accurate diagnoses, and ultimately improving patient outcomes.
Despite making up 51% of the world’s population, products and services specifically tailored to women’s health needs are lagging behind. According to a McKinsey report, women spend an average of 9 years in poor health, 25% more time than men. As a result, productivity and earning potential are affected simultaneously.
Artificial intelligence (AI) shows great potential in addressing major healthcare challenges and accelerating the creation of women-specific products and services. For example, the European Council’s recommendation to use digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) for breast cancer screening has increased the number of images that radiologists need to review. AI tools such as Hologic’s 3DQuorum Imaging Technology can help by minimizing the number of images that need to be reviewed. This technology produces high-resolution SmartSlices with 6 mm overlapping SmartSlices without compromising image quality, sensitivity or accuracy. Using SmartSlices reduces radiologists’ workload by two-thirds, saving them approximately one hour of interpretation time each day.
Traditionally, breast screening images require a second reader to ensure accuracy, adding to the radiologists’ workload. AI has the potential to take over this role by efficiently identifying areas of interest within mammograms, speeding up the review process and allowing radiologists to work more efficiently without sacrificing accuracy.
The potential of AI can significantly improve women’s healthcare by addressing key issues, improving diagnostic accuracy, and streamlining medical imaging processes. This not only helps healthcare providers, but also ensures that women receive timely and accurate diagnoses, leading to better overall health outcomes.
With each passing day, we move closer to a fully digitized and AI-driven healthcare system. Advances in remote reading are paving the way for facilities in remote or underserved areas to access high-quality imaging and diagnostic services without logistical hurdles. For women who travel long distances for screenings, AI can play a critical role in triage. In the past, radiologists had to interrupt their workflow to quickly review these patients’ results. Now, AI tools can highlight areas of concern in real time, helping radiologists prioritize complex cases. This technology is especially useful in breast and cervical cancer screenings, as patients with urgent needs can receive a timely diagnosis, improving their overall healthcare experience.
The road ahead
The role of AI in healthcare will grow significantly in the coming years. Embracing innovation should include leveraging these advanced algorithms, particularly to make advances in women’s health. Current technologies are already helping to address the backlog in breast and cervical cancer screenings and improve early detection capabilities. Companies that are at the forefront of this movement must continually refine their technologies to improve patient care, with an emphasis on inclusivity and accessibility so that women everywhere can benefit from these developments.
Healthcare is a massive global industry, worth $12 trillion. According to Binarks, the global healthcare AI market was worth $16 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow 40.2% annually to $173.5 billion in 2029. The integration of AI into healthcare is developing rapidly and offers the opportunity to significantly improve patient care, reduce costs, and accelerate medical research.
Our current healthcare systems are under enormous pressure and could collapse at any moment. There is an urgent need to move from a volume-based model that focuses on budgets, business models and waiting lists to a more holistic approach that focuses on preventive medicine.
AI plays a crucial role in this new paradigm and helps create a healthcare system that is more efficient, effective and accessible to all.
