According to Maxime Vermeir, senior director of AI strategy at ABBYY, an intelligent automation company, 2024 will see a boom in artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. Vermeir predicts that there will be a shift from general AI to more specialized, contextual AI and machine learning systems that address specific business problems effectively. The use of generative AI like ChatGPT is unlikely to grow due to energy consumption and regulatory scrutiny. Instead, purpose-built AI applications will be developed to address precise medical challenges such as disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient management.
Vermeir also predicts that the AI boom will result in a skills gap and a need for more specialist IT training in healthcare. With the increasing use of AI to augment staff with administrative duties, healthcare workers will need training to effectively work with AI systems. Vermeir emphasizes the importance of upskilling and reskilling initiatives to ensure equitable access to AI tools and their benefits. There are already workshops, webinars, and open-source tools available, as well as more intense offerings from online learning platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and edX.
Furthermore, Vermeir suggests that the boom in AI in healthcare will lead to greater scrutiny of processes. With the growth of digital transformation and AI investment, health IT leaders at provider organizations will need to analyze their current processes for efficiency, success, and compliance. Vermeir recommends implementing analytics technology, such as process intelligence, to gather deep insights and inform strategic choices for automation projects. Process intelligence combines task mining and process mining to depict an accurate and detailed model of a workflow in real-time. It can help identify opportunities for automation and ensure compliance with data protection and auditability requirements in healthcare.