Why we need AI in healthcare

This can benefit a wide variety of industries, one of which being healthcare. From patient care to managing a hospital’s operations you can enhance a vast array of processes with AI. And while there will certainly be significant efficiencies increases in productivity driven by adopting this technology, this comes from a place of enablement, not replacement.

Here are some key examples of ways in which AI is already transforming healthcare.

Keeping track of supplies and patients

Hospitals are sprawling and open areas, with an enormous number of patients, staff, and visitors traversing the grounds at any given time. This means it can be challenging to monitor the entire property while giving every patient and staff member the proper level of attention. AI can help ease that burden by automatically detecting and alerting on pre-defined situations and events. The technology greatly aids situational awareness and can alert security personnel of aggressive and other types of worrying behavior in live time.

For instance, advancements in scene intelligence allows for very precise object tracking which is incredibly useful for a variety of healthcare scenarios. Real-time object location tracking can track people and equipment throughout the property. This allows you to track patients who are at risk of wandering, including behavioral health patients who may pose a risk of violence or mental health patients who may become lost. If a patient is on the ground or unmoving for a certain period of time, a caregiver can be alerted immediately, ensuring optimal response time. Object location tracking can also be applied to loiterers and ultimately preventing criminal activity from taking place such as infant abduction. 

Healthcare units tend to have limited numbers of staff to patient ratio. AI is needed to help automate workflows and provide you with more time to tend to patient needs and other more pressing matters. For example, a common workflow for AI enables you to keep track of how many people are in a room (useful for detecting if the emergency room is overcrowded, or if there is a long line forming at acceptance desk), how many cars are present or how much stock is left. It can then notify when there’s a low threshold of stock rather than requiring someone to go and check. Additionally, it can support with tracking an individual patient or resident. 

Especially with workflows requiring restrictive access, behavioral health patients, children getting lost and seniors leaving their premises, you can utilize object attributes such as the type of top or trousers they were wearing, while still respecting patient and resident privacy.

In areas such as a behavioral health or an emergency room where you know cameras are needed but consent for monitoring may not have been expressly given, the appropriate levels of privacy can be applied using AI. For Lee Health’s emergency room, they use embedded AI in their cameras to blur out patients features while still being able to see everything else in the room such as knowing how many people are in that room, gestures, if someone is laying on the floor and so forth. 

This dynamic masking can also be used in infant hospitals and senior living accommodations to monitor if patients are standing or laying or behaving in any other concerning way, while still easing concerns of an over invasion of privacy.

Maintaining safety as a priority 

A number of things can take place at the same time within a healthcare facility, and it can be near-impossible for staff to keep on top of every urgent scenario on their own. AI can therefore play a crucial role in ensuring that you’re aware in real-time and can promptly attend to urgent matters.

For example, object location functions such as fall detection and “out of bed” detection can be used to alert when a patient is deemed at risk of fall. The technology constructs a skeletal frame of the patient, ensuring that it can identify when a patient has fallen without the need to collect any personal identifiable information (PII). 

The same technology can be used to identify when a patient has gotten out of bed, as well as how long they have been out of bed – and whether they have fallen from a bed or onto the floor. This ensures minimal response time when a patient considered a fall risk is engaging in risky behavior, allowing healthcare personnel to prevent a fall before it occurs or notify medical staff immediately in the event of an injury. A Wisconsin healthcare provider experienced an 80% reduction in falls during its pilot of a fall prevention program.

Meanwhile, sound detection AI can be used to automatically monitor for coughing, and even measure the cadence and severity of coughs. The technology can also detect aggression and telemetry and physiological alarms, among other warning signs.

Proactive monitoring of healthcare environment 

• Identifying a vehicle is as important as the ability to identify a person. License plate recognition can provide useful data on vehicles frequently lingering in sensitive areas. It can also help identify a vehicle involved in a crime, such as vandalism on hospital property, an assault or attempted assault on patients or staff, trespassing after hours, or drive-by crimes (such as picking up a patient against their will). This is all valuable evidence for both hospital security and law enforcement.
• Wrong-way detection uses object location to enable you to go beyond simply identifying a vehicle. Often, vehicle theft occurs after a vehicle enters the property in an unusual way. Perpetrators sometimes avoid normal entrances in the hopes of entering an area undetected. The ability to detect when a driver is behaving unusually or erratically can also help healthcare employees see when a medical event may be in progress.
• Weapon detection intelligence is also enabled through object location and can help with automatically identifying when a weapon may be present. In a worst-case scenario in a healthcare facility, a weapon – such as firearms – can be on the grounds. If an AI model outside the building entrance identifies a possible weapon, it can alert security before the individual even enters the building. With proper procedures in place, the security team may be able to lock down the building and alert law enforcement in real time.

Bolstering the healthcare workforce

Today’s AI capabilities can serve a great deal of assistance for working in healthcare facilities. Whether it’s to improve patient monitoring or more efficient staffing, by adding embedded intelligence to your surveillance system it will enable better patient outcomes and create safer, more effective facilities.

As healthcare organizations that decide to leverage AI you must also ensure your use of AI aligns with your governance, ethics, and data protection policies.