The Future of Healthcare: How AI and Blockchain Will Transform the Medical Industry

[Rich_Bird]

The technological advancements in the global healthcare industry are hurtling at light speed. At a time when the medical industry is undergoing drastic changes, healthcare OEMs look forward to the growing technological trends to improve all aspects of patient care and enhanced clinical collaboration. In one of HPE's recent webinars, we got to explore the importance of creating a flexible, digital foundation to support a host of use cases made possible by emerging technologies.

I had the opportunity to collaborate with expert Matthew Quirk (Global Market Strategy & Development Manager, HPE), during a recent webinar, where we discussed real-world examples and how blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are changing the healthcare today. People across the world have been living with complex health conditions for long, and costly healthcare has made patients' lives worse. This has, thereby, created an opening for technology to optimize the constrained resources we already have and improve care now, as well as support clinicians. Hence, moving forward, we expect to see AI and Blockchain feature prominently as innovation pervades the healthcare space, with OEMs such as HPE providing the foundation.

AI and Blockchain play significant roles in the evolution of the healthcare industry, while OEMs play a pivotal role in making the advancements possible. The webinar showcases a use case, which involves one of HPE’s healthcare technology partners that developed an AI solution for chest radiography and mammography. The company started its journey with AI to address steep growth in imaging a 20% rise in detection rates by shortening the reading time by 40%. AI enabled the company to achieve a 50% reduction in recall rates, and from a patient experience perspective, there was a much faster turnaround time. Adding up to this, Matt Quirk said, "The company has now tested more than 1.7 million images and operates in 80 countries. From an OEM perspective, HPE supported it from the design process all the way through testing and deployment as well as supporting the company to scale globally".

When it comes to Blockchain, the implementation of technology faces many challenges, and users feel they were faster without it. Perception can play a key role here, according to Bird and Quirk. For distributed ledger technology, rather than envisioning it as a complete medical record carrying imaging, patient notes, and drug history, and delivering all that data across the life cycle of the patient, it is actually about identity management. That is, using it as a fingerprint to link the ID to other databases and providing assurance of the patient’s identity and the right to access that data rather than loading the whole patient record.

As consumers steer the digital transformation, and healthcare’s future takes shape, digital technology will be a keystone of that evolution. Thanks to technologies like AI and Blockchain that is bringing the change. The speed and efficiency of healthcare can now be increased to better support clinicians, empower patients, advance medicine, and enable more personalized care and better clinical decision-making, delivering a new style of healthcare.

Check out the full webinar here to learn more.

Rich Bird
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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