ITC Infotech Blog

Applications of AI in Healthcare – ITC Infotech

The world of AI

Artificial Intelligence has been around the block for a while now. It aims to imitate the way cognitive functions work in humans. Essentially, AI is the application of machine learning concepts, be it support vector machines, neural network, deep learning or natural language processing. The most important features of AI are its self-learning and correcting abilities. By analyzing large volumes of data, AI can be used to assist all healthcare entities in hospitals, insurance and clinical trials. It can be leveraged to build proactive protocols where real-time inferences are used to make predictions and take action before an adverse event occurs.

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Value-Based Care: A New Era in US Healthcare

Changing Landscape of US Healthcare

For years, the most prominent model of healthcare delivery was fee-for-service. The patient would approach the provider for treatment in exchange for reimbursement by the patient’s payer. This was a very transactional interaction where the treatment results were not tracked and healthcare costs simply kept spiraling. The reason: progress of the patient’s health condition was inconsequential to healthcare organizations; they were paid for the treatment provided regardless of the outcome. Eventually, there was a realization, especially among regulators, that there is need for a new direction that ensures the ultimate well being of the patient.

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Digital Deluge: What is in it for the customer?

Have you been staring down the poor ROI or bad response rate to your marketing campaign? Ask yourself, “What was in it for the customer?” Once a golden rule of marketing is unfortunately the forgotten part of today’s ever-so-clever ways of interrupting the customer journey through AI & ML techniques, look alike modelling & predictive analytics.

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Differentiated Customer Experience – Standardization, Personalization and Differentiation

With growing commoditization and parity of products and services, customer experience is today widely accepted as the most effective differentiator. However, in the world of me-too brands and marketers, parity in customer experience on digital platforms can easily be achieved with off-shelf technology. This article attempts to explore ways and means through which a brand can consistently provide differentiated brand experiences at every touchpoint.

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Digital Business for a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Today, as we seamlessly achieve things like ordering groceries or meals from the comfort of our homes, we have little hesitation in saying digital has truly impacted all walks of life, changing the way business is carried out. This article is a POV – digital business for a sustainable competitive advantage.

As we trace back the association of digital, digital marketing was the flagbearer of digital business, as organizations started to move from predominantly television and print advertising to online-technology-enabled platforms, trying to follow the customer into the digital world. In essence, customer adoption of digital communication technology drove organizational approach to digital marketing. When they moved to Facebook, FB become the buzzword, and when customers started tweeting, Twitter become the platform of engagement. In essence, customers led organizations in to the digital world.

With advent of cloud technologies, access to computational power and high-tech tools increased exponentially, enabling rapid development and deployment of technology platforms to propel business forward. Advent and customer adoption of ecommerce and e-marketplaces, have brought about a paradigm change in the fundamental building blocks of business, with technology becoming the driver of business growth and business dependent on technology platform to operate.

Today, businesses have embraced digital as key business driver and technology has come to the center stage, giving rise to two kinds of digital businesses:

Digital as Business Driver
Digital as the Business Disruptor – Where digital is the business model

Digital as a Business Driver and Digital Transformation:

Traditional brick and mortar businesses or offline businesses are now transforming themselves into digital businesses, where critical processes are either automated or performed with the help of digital technologies to increase operational efficiencies, and reduce cost and time to market. Data created by the usage of these platforms is being analyzed and processes optimized, leading to greater operational efficiency and eventually to cost leadership, a sustainable competitive advantage.

Digital as Business Disruptor – Where digital is the Business Model

New-age businesses like aggregators and e-marketplaces have built their businesses and revenue models on digital, disrupting markets across the globe, unlocking customer value. Mobility and penetration of mobile internet have revolutionized the way organizations interact, transact and monetize customer relationships. New markets are being created at the bleeding edge of digital innovation and old ones sacrificed at the altar of digital disruption, as digital capabilities are enabling businesses to create sustainable competitive advantage.

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Role of Analytics in Managing Chronic Conditions

Six in 10 Adults in the US have a chronic disease. Four in 10 US adults have 2 or more chronic diseases¹.

The Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease estimates that by 2030, 83 million people in the U.S. will have three or more chronic health conditions, up from 31 million in 2015².

Chronic conditions are the leading cause of death & disability and a leading driver of US annual healthcare cost. US healthcare costs for chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease totaled $1.1 trillion in 2016. If the lost economic productivity is accounted, the total economic impact was $3.7 trillion. This is equivalent to nearly 20 percent of the US gross domestic product².

As per CMS estimates, healthcare spending is expected to continue to grow at an average of 5.5 percent through 2025, with chronic disease treatment comprising a major portion of it. Chronic diseases eat up significant healthcare dollars for payers and other health organizations, leaving them with challenges of covering care for patients with these expensive, long-term conditions.

Analytics to drive care value

By 2020, it is estimated that the amount of individual health information will double every 73 days³. Data gathered from structured and traditional sources, IoT devices, and large sets of unstructured big data information can help create new-generation tools that can bring us better insights, dependable recommendations, and real-time feedback.

As care delivery continues to evolve from reactive disease treatment to proactive preventive care, more healthcare organizations are looking at advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to assist in drawing actionable items from their big data resources.

Analytics is playing an increasingly important role in risk stratification. For instance, it helps predict which individuals might develop chronic conditions such as diabetes or heart failure. Integrating such actionable insights into payer and provider prevention initiatives, clinician workflow, and patient engagement activities can help raise awareness of risk for both clinicians and patients. It can lead to the recommendations for evidence-based preventative measures to reduce risk.

Healthcare organizations can follow these steps to utilize analytics in chronic care management within their own workflows:

Identify the sources of data in healthcare, both internal and external.
Apply analytics model to specific healthcare challenges in chronic management, such as managing pre-diabetes and diabetes at the population level.
Use observations and actionable insights from analytics to achieve desired care outcomes

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My First Blog Post

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
What topics do you think you’ll write about?
Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.