Care is integral to the lives of people with health and disabilities and is often vital to short-term requirements after surgery or an accident. Still, care is a process, solution, and delivery method that potentially will be converted to Artificial Intelligence (AI). When we consider the connection to care through the lens of race, economics, and gender, there is still inequity. Now consider the impact of care with the infusion of AI and how it will change the role and delivery of care. Consider the elimination of careers limiting the services already shrinking after the pandemic. AI will create new areas of care advancements along with gaps in services. Generative AI is offering new solutions to healthcare. Forbes reports, “There has been a lot of hype around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) across industries—so much hype, in fact, that it can be hard to separate truth from fiction. But healthcare is one area where the importance of this technology cannot be overstated.”
Stat News commented, “AI models are actually doing when they produce an answer. In short, they’re doing math.” The gaps in care under race and economics can make math more divisive if the only logic being disseminated is based on current data that is far from complete.
“AI experts are still trying to understand, and explain, how and why they work better than prior systems, and what blind spots might undermine their usefulness in medicine,” states Stat News in Health Tech in the article “What does generative AI mean for healthcare?
The big question is to mind the blind spots. The blind spots are what this caregiver is critical to mention. Even people in care who are insured need advocates and often family members to gain thorough care. Now AI steps into the care picture, which can expedite information, eradicate data loss, and reduce risks to healthcare organizations, but this does not always flow back to patient’s care.
Sami Kosaraju, Manager KPMG Ignition reveals, “Generative AI has demonstrated remarkable progress in deciphering complex health data and has the potential to revolutionize healthcare with personalized treatment plans, proficient image analysis, and predictive analytics. Yet, the underrepresentation of marginalized communities in health data poses a risk of deepening healthcare disparities and further engraining systemic biases at scale. To mitigate this, we must invest in comprehensive data collection initiatives that prioritize these populations and rely on strategies such as synthetic data generation to fill the gaps in the meantime.”
The opportunity for AI is to manage care needs while systematically increasing organizations’ growth. The advancement of AI may require changes in healthcare management to Value-Based Care. Sheila Talton, CEO of Gray Matter Analytics, shared that “advanced analytics can help providers looking to change care delivery and approaches around member engagement by enabling them to incorporate information regarding social determinants.” She said, “Social determinants can account for 80% of health outcomes.”
Talton promoting value-based care (VBC), stated in What You Don’t Know About Your Patients Could Cost You, said, “Healthcare spending is projected to exceed $6 trillion by 2028, largely driven by rising costs of care for an aging population and the growing number of Americans suffering from chronic physical conditions such as pulmonary disease, diabetes and hypertension. Unfortunately, too many provider organizations lack the insights into their patient populations that are necessary to offer whole-person care. They may fail to recognize the existence of social determinants of health (SDoH) — the financial, social and environmental conditions that significantly affect a person’s well-being.”
The inability to capture information on those understudied or undervalued in care will continue to be under-assessed in a data-driven structure.
I am advocating for quality care for all! The gaps in social determinants in healthcare will effectively become gaps in AI, impacting the best care. AI can offer some solutions to increasing process care, but we will all need to be concerned about what AI does not know, especially for people of color and women.
Guest of the Impact of AI on Care:
Sheila Talton is the President and CEO of Gray Matter Analytics, which she founded in 2013.
Sami Kosaraju (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sami-kosaraju) Manager, KPMG Ignition – Innovation Lab