AI is used extensively everywhere. We talk about how AI is used to make money, automate tasks and create services. However, the important thing is that technology should be created to make our lives easier. And yes, AI has made our lives easier in different ways. In this post I explore how AI is being used in healthcare.
In healthcare, AI is not used to replace a doctor or nurse, at least not any time soon. However, AI is used to supplement clinical practices like speeding up processes, automate and organise certain tasks, making precise prescriptions of diseases and observing accurate progress of diseases over time. AI is also being researched in the mental health area to identify mental illnesses at a earlier stage so that intervention can be more effective based on individual characteristics.
Nursing
According to a 2025 review published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies , AI has the potential to improve patient monitoring, support their clinical judgement to improve patient outcomes.
I myself once worked on a project in the past, where I analysed and predicted the progress of patient’s foot ulcers based on their weekly images. The predictions were fast and up to 92% accurate.
The goal is to provide healthcare professionals a tool to monitor healing, identify cases that might require closer attention and support their judgement.
Surgery Assistance
AI in surgery plays multiple roles according to the 2024 review “Artificial Intelligence in Surgery: The Future Is Now” AI is used in early diagnosis and patient screening, surgical planning, robotic-assisted surgery and in intraoperative decision support where AI analyses live images and data in real time to aid surgeon’s decision making process, post operation monitoring and patient follow up care as well.
Patient chatbots
AI chatbots are integrated into almost every customer service systems now. So it makes sense to integrate AI chatbots to answer patient’s basic questions as well. How it works is by feeding the patient’s information and care facility’s public information into the AI model as a context and the AI model answer patient’s questions according to the context.
This reduces the patients to call or visit a healthcare facility for routine enquiries, saving them time and improving access to information. In addition, it allows healthcare workers to focus on cases that require more attention
AI is not a bad thing
While AI is becoming increasingly widespread, many people remain skeptical about its use. When developed and used ethically, AI has proven to be a valuable tool that can support healthcare professionals and improve patient care rather than replace human expertise.
Research into AI in healthcare is still ongoing, with the aim of maximizing its potential while ensuring it remains safe, reliable, and beneficial for both patients and healthcare providers.
If you like articles like this, subscribe, like and comment!
Leave a Reply