How AI and big data are changing healthcare in the Middle East
AI and big data analytics are allowing healthcare providers in the Middle East to make faster, more cost-effective diagnostics, according to a broad cross-section of healthcare professionals. Along with the increasing use of AI and big data, though, security concerns about data privacy are also growing.
AI is one of the fastest growing segments of the global healthcare market today. According to Frost & Sullivan forecasts, it will reach US$6.6 billion by the end of this year. Such growth rates are possible thanks to the huge amounts of data generated by a wide variety of devices, which can be analysed and acted on.
In the Middle East, healthcare professionals attest to the effectiveness and increasing usage of AI.
“We started the digital transformation journey last year with the focus on technology being the core to the foundation of the American Hospital. We’ve teamed up with some big names like Oracle and Microsoft to build a new level of intelligence when it comes to models,” said Ahmad Yahya, CIO of American Hospital Dubai.
The hospital’s IT team created a new COVID diagnostics application built on its clinical database and modelling from Cerner. It was customised and validated by the clinical staff at the hospital intensive care unit, and helped identify risk factors for patients, as well as in deciding who would go to the ICU.
Two other AI-based diagnostic applications are aimed at identifying asthma patients and predicting whether emergency patients will go to an in-patient ward.
“We are currently working on all these AI models with one of them, the COVID one, having been already validated, while the other two are close to being validated. We are also working on going live early next year with real-time monitoring of patients’ sentiments, satisfaction, and (hospital) capacity,” which can serve to help allocate resources, Yahyah disclosed earlier this year, at the Arab Health 2021 event in Dubai.
With a wealth of historical medical records available for analysis, AI can be helpful in making a diagnosis and choosing an appropriate treatment, providing the doctor with a “third opinion”, healthcare professionals say. AI applications are able to analyse all available medical information about a specific disease, and find out which treatments and drugs have been the most effective in the entire history of medical practice.
Medicine is a data-rich field in which accuracy is perhaps the most critical factor. The more data that algorithms process, the more accurately and correctly they will be able to formulate conclusions based on them. Meanwhile, different types of technology in use today are generating an increasing volume of health data, according to Massimo Cannizzo, CEO of Gellify, a venture capital company that in October launched a US$50 million fund with management group Azimut to invest in companies providing healthcare and emerging technology in the Middle East.
There are, for example, various wearable devices that are gaining popularity and generating health information, including portable heart rate and blood pressure monitors — devices that can continuously monitor your heart rate or blood sugar.
As their cost decreases and the functionality of the already popular fitness bracelets expands, AI-based diagnostic systems will receive even more data on the health of each individual patient, giving the doctor the opportunity to more accurately and efficiently prescribe a treatment plan.
The rise of so-called augmented healthcare is demonstrated by the growth figures of wearables market in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, where 25% of the adult population is expected to be using a wearable device by 2022, according to Cannizzo.
Algorithms and AI models — programmes or sets of algorithms that use a set of data to recognise patterns and perform tasks — are constantly improving, and this progress is already finding expression in specific applications in the medical field.
