AI to enhance healthcare system and improve COVID-19 treatment in Britain

healthcare system

The pandemic has shifted the focus regarding many areas in our lives by changing our norms and finding it vital to always search for new ways to improve care, especially as we fight Coronavirus.

While the vaccine is being rolled out around the world in order to fight the virus, artificial intelligence (AI) has also proved to be an effective tool in this scope.

As such, the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) will use AI to help improve the outcome for COVID-19 patients and reduce their time spent in hospital.

Benefits of AI

Before the series of lockdowns began, artificial intelligence is being used extensively in many countries to help detect, diagnose and prevent the spread of the virus.

This new-old method includes algorithms that identify patterns and anomalies that are already working to detect and predict the spread of COVID-19, while image recognition systems are speeding up medical diagnosis.

Some of the ways AI can help medical centers and hospitals are:

  1. Help identify virus transmission chains and check broader economic impacts. AI technologies demonstrated their potential to deduce epidemiological data more rapidly than traditional reporting of health data, following several cases.
  2. Institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and the OECD (oecd.ai) also included interactive dashboards that track the virus’ spread through live news and real-time data on confirmed coronavirus cases, recoveries, and deaths.
  3. Artificial intelligence has an early warning system that can help detect epidemiological patterns by digging mainstream news, online content amongst other information channels to provide early warnings related to healthcare networks and data flows.
  4. Data collection of populations is key to ensuring scalability and accuracy which is followed by rapid diagnosis to limit contagion and understand the disease spread.

AI could help to rapidly diagnose COVID-19 cases by quickly analysing large volumes of research data. This technology’s text and data mining tools can uncover the virus’ history, transmission, and diagnostics, management measures, and lessons from previous epidemics.

Monitor COVID-19 cases

On the other hand, Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, said: “The use of artificial intelligence is already beginning to transform patient care by making the NHS a more predictive, preventive, and personalised health and care service.”

Many countries are using population surveillance to monitor COVID-19 cases (In Korea, algorithms use geolocation data, surveillance-camera footage and credit card records to trace coronavirus patients).

In addition, AI imaging database will improve diagnosis of patients presenting with COVID-19 symptoms, whilst increased speed and accuracy in diagnosis can lead to early medical intervention and save lives.

Contact tracing systems to identify possible infection routes is a method being implemented in many countries such as Austria, China, Poland, Singapore and Korea.

The power of artificial intelligence is employed to treat one of the most crucial health crises that humans are facing and will have a huge potential for future treatments.